"Ah it's not for you... its more of a Shelyville idea"
Shelbyville and East Haverbrook have one!
How'd that Las Vegas monorail work out? Oh, right, bankrupt. Guess they're not magic.
What does Clinton think about all this?
"Ah it's not for you... its more of a Shelyville idea"
I’m not sure if it’s true or not, but I heard that when Walt Disney was building Disneyland, he offered to expand the monorail to major areas in and around L.A. But, the city planners at the time turned him down, because the freeeway system was the way of the future...lol
Santa Monica is a hopeless liberal circus. Try walking the streets there, and in Venice to the south. They’ve set up a protectorate for aggressive homeless panhandlers.
Any other Santa Monica FReepers out there?
Doesn’t Disneyland have one?
This is government working with union thugs for control.
Control the food and control of transportation means
less freedom, throw the power of death via health care
into the mix and freedom is totally lost.
too many monorail jokes, must resist.
Westerners simply don’t ride public transportation. With a few exceptions trains, trolleys, and people movers have been utter failures and huge money pits anywhere in the Western States, especially California. The San Francisco Bay area is an exception because it’s a compact region with only one or two commuter “destinations.” Southern California is the absolute worst place for this kind of transportation due to the infinite combination of residences and destinations.
Because there's better use for urban real estate than occupying it with railroad tracks?
The Big Dig in Boston has taken a lot of justified heat for cost overruns, construction errors, etc. But the great thing that it did was to take a number of acres in the middle of one of the most densely populated areas of the country and change them from occupation by a roadway (while still retaining the roadway) and open them up for parkways and commercial development. It also removed a physical barrier that prevented people from going from one neighborhood to another and from accessing the waterfront.
Yeah, and the Mojave and Sahara deserts need bars and restaurants, too.
Santa Monica needs an enema!
They should be sure to connect it to the new Unicorn Museum.
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.