The Monorail is Dead

Monorails are safe. There is nothing inherently dangerous about them. The recent accident at Walt Disney World was the first fatality in the history of the 38 year old system. I would gladly ride in the cockpit of a monorail without a care in the world. The monorail is safe.

That's about the only thing this mode of transportation has going for it.

When I was a young teenager I loved monorails. I would pour over books and web sites about them. I would talk about them constantly. I wanted to be a monorail pilot when I grew up. My parents thought I had autism and sent me to a specialist. Turns out I was just stupid.

I was dangerously close to becoming a monorail zealot, like the kind of people who join The Monorail Society. I thought that the monorail was the solution to our city's congestion problems. I envisioned monorails whisking people across Southern California. In 1963, Ray Bradbury condemned the City of Los Angeles when they refused Alweg's offer to build a monorail system that crisscrossed the city for free as long as they were allowed to collect the fare revenues. It turns out that they made the right decision, if not for the wrong reasons.

Ray Bradbury's monorail vision for Los Angeles.

Ray Bradbury will die someday, his dreams of monorails towering over Los Angeles unfulfilled. I hope that he at least takes solace in the fact that more reasonable forms of transportation are transforming Los Angeles County with each addition to our expanding light rail, subway and heavy rail network. Along with rail, innovations on the bus system, such as Metro's hugely successful Rapid Bus network, is making mass transit less for "those" people and more for everybody. Residents and non-residents alike are finding even more alternatives to the personal automobile.

What monorail zealots fail to take into account is that the majority of monorail installations in the United States have been complete and utter failures. The Las Vegas Monorail is, excuse my French, a piece of shit train that not even a rail wonk like me would bother riding again. There is talk of an expansion but how realistic that plan turns out to be is suspect.

The world's most successful monorail operation.

Seattle's monorail is a neat tourist attraction but failed to capture the imaginations of transportation planners. Sure, it's self sufficient, but how could it not be when you charge $2 a ride to travel 1.2 miles? The Seattle Monorail Project never got off the ground. No surprise there. Most other installations are merely theme park attractions.

The only successful monorail operation in the United States, successful meaning that it's more than a tourist attraction and is actually okay at moving people, is at Walt Disney World, and they have neglected any notion of expanding that system in the foreseeable future. Disney World has instead opted to use buses to transport people to Animal Kingdom, MGM Studios and other destinations within the resort. The same is true at Disneyland, where there is nary a rumor that someday the monorail will be expanded to other destinations such as the possible third gate. Nobody is stupid enough to start that rumor. No one would believe it.

This flies in the face of Walt Disney's vision for Disney World, who made all-electric forms of transportation a focus of his EPCOT. No, not Epcot, EPCOT.

The new Mark VII monorail makes a rare appearance.

Monorails are expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if current Disney World management stopped running a monorail operation and switched to buses to cut costs. Then they can sell off parts of the trains for a quick infusion of cash (precedent was set with the Electrical Parade) and offer nostalgic merchandise related to the retired attraction to sycophantic Disney nerds.

Monorails were great on untouched land such as the festering swamp that is Walt Disney World. The idea of running monorails through existing cities, however, runs into trouble. A monorail alignment was studied as part of the Metro Westside Subway Extension project in West Los Angeles. It was determined that a monorail alignment would overpower the street scape and not be able to offer the capacity that a heavy rail subway would. A decision was made to extend the current Purple Line subway to Santa Monica instead, and rightly so. Monorail projects run into similar problems everywhere else. "19th century technology" such as steel-wheeled trains running on steel-wheeled tracks is just more versatile than concrete-beamed monorail systems.

Shiny? Yes. Useful? No. Such is the fate of most monorails.

Much like the company whose founder introduced this kind of train to America, I've lost faith in the monorail.

The monorail is dead.