Santa's got Monica's monorail raight heah.
Posted on 03/10/2010 8:54:57 AM PST by Willie Green
Yeah, and the Mojave and Sahara deserts need bars and restaurants, too.
Santa Monica needs an enema!
Say what? Come on down to Chicago and stand outside Union Station during rush hour. Millions of people take public transportation every day here. I used to be one of them when I worked downtown. I'm afraid that this statement is simply untrue.
Because there's better use for urban real estate than occupying it with railroad tracks?
Well yeah... but the author's point is that monorail also avoids occupying urban real estate with RR tracks.
By going over-head, all that is needed at ground level is a small footprint for the support pillars.
It's cheaper than tunnelling and uses much less land in congested urban areas than traditional ground level rail systems.
They should be sure to connect it to the new Unicorn Museum.
Thanks for the clarifacation! It was probabley a great idea at the time, but these days the government would have to invoke iminment domain, and trample over private property rights to build it now, besides the fact were just plain broke. Another case of vision being trumped by political kick backs to the unions, who built are wonderful freeway system no doubt.
Damn, you beat me to it...
My first thought exactly!
When I saw how the Las Vegas Monorail was implemented, it was pretty easy to predict what would happen.
It's off the strip. To get to it, you have to walk through the casino, and a casino's layout is designed to keep you from leaving without being impeded or distracted.
It doesn't stop at every casino. If you aren't staying at a casino with a monorail stop, you have to walk out to the strip and then back in again (see above).
It actually diverges from the northern part of the strip so that it can stop at the city convention center next to the Hilton. That made it that much harder to redevelop that part of the strip.
It doesn't (yet) go to the airport. If that extension is implemented, it might be useful. But at the moment, it's not very useful for commuting up and down the strip. There are city-operated shuttles that work better.
I’m here, too! Glad to meet you two — let’s see - that makes 3 of us here in liberalville.
—primary reason the Las Vegas one didn’t work is that it doesn’t take anyone from where they are to where they want to be-—
Santa Monica has only Fonda Communists, don’t spend one taxpayer cent on that hellhole!!
Like I need piles
Guess WHICH supervisor for more than 20 years has backed the sensibility of monorails and not let himself be railroaded (no pun intended!) by idiots who think that just because Disneyland uses them, they're fantasty fun and not seriously sensible? L.A. County supervisor Mike Antonovich, a Republican (though that's pretty relative here in So Cal!). Subways in Southern California are ridiculously stupid. It's like building a gigantic freezer in Anarctica -- totally wasted effort. But worse -- this writer didn't include the fact that when that silly, ridiculous "subway" that goes only a few short miles in downtown L.A. was built, it not only went overbudget by a huge percentage, but the shaking and rattling from the excavation caused serious damage and closures in many local businesses and really whanged a lot of business owners. It was stupid from the git-go. This is NOT the East Coast, and East Coast transportaion models don't work here.
Monorails should have been installed at least 20 years ago on the already existing and well-though Red Car right-of-ways that are still all over the place (they go all the way from Pasadena to Huntington Beach, if I remember correctly) in the form of very wide medians down main boulevards. They went to Redlands, San Bernardino, Long Beach, Riverside -- pretty much where there are freeways now, Red Car right-of-ways go or went.
For the specific circumstances in Southern California, considering its climate, traffic density, and geography, monorails would perfect and extremely cost-effective not just in terms of materials and right-of-ways and maintenance, but in terms of safety. Again, this article (probably for reasons of space) really downplayed the lethal danger that Light Rail presents in So Cal. People get killed via the ligh rail trains all the time, plus they're noisy as hell and disrupt traffic.
If you've ever been to Disney World's Contemporary Hotel, you know EXACTLY how sensible monorails are. The monorail runs literally through the hotel, where and while guests are sleeping, dining, etc., and they're so quiet you don't even hear them. The tracks can be pre-fabbed, trucked to the location, and erected so the trains run with minimal disturbance to traffic -- again, it is well demonstrated at WDW.
But most of the time, people who object to monorails do it on pure emotion, though they tell themselves that it's the opposite. One guy who should have known better told me the reason I, Antonovich, and others liked the idea of monorails for LA was because they're "sexy," sexier than light rail or subways. This guy was more worried about being perceived as a non-macho Disney geek than he was about a sensible, smart solution to a pretty ugly problem in L.A. HE was the one rejecting it based on emotion, not reason. Very ironic.
They can pay for it with the fines from all of the scam tickets their cops give to commuters.
“And millions of us use public transit to commute back and forth to work every day.”
A few of you enviro whackos use it!
The new Sprinter in San Diego County doesn’t even get enough riders to pay for the help.
Buy a car and become a human!!
Sound Transit finished an elevated train to the airport from downtown Seattle last year. It seemed like a good way to spend a few billion dollars. Ridership thus far has mostly been dismal. The fares do not cover even a tiny percentage of the operating expenses. Even if it really catches on, there is no projected point in the future when fares will ever even cover the operating expenses let alone the capitol expenditures.
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