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ChineseMetroMovies: TranSolution
Contributed by Fred Camino on February 6th, 2007 at 12:59 pm
[youtube]r70UlwbRuWo[/youtube]
Marissa Gluck over at CurbedLA discovered this fantastical MetroMovie that proposes building a monorail over the Los Angeles river bed. Intriguing. Could add a whole new layer to the Los Angeles River Revitalization Plan. We’ll just have to wait 30 to 50 years to see!
Discussion
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Please keep discussions civil: exercise Troll Controll.
What a great video. Well done and thought provoking. I love the Disney World Monorail. Disney has been able to take the average non-public transit system American, make him pay an arm and a leg to visit the park and have him ride mass transit (Disney style) while smiling! Why can’t LA do it.
Why do we need a monorail? Using something like the river as a transitway isn’t unheard of (Northern NJ, London), but… why a monorail? I can’t imagine that the whole project hinges on having an overhead guideway here. There’s already high quality off-the-shelf light and heavy rail rolling stock and track we could buy, I don’t think there’s any serious evidence that a monorail is going to get people out of their cars just because it’s cute and nifty. Cute and nifty gets you a theme park, not a commuter.
Surely the monorail aspect is somewhat silly, but why is elevated rail (heavy or light rail) seldom talked about in Los Angeles transit? I’ve heard it referred to as an eyesore, but what is this city but a collection of eyesores? I’ve heard people mention accessibility, but how is a subway any more accessible? If you’re in a wheelchair you’re going to have to use the elevator either way.
Plus, we already have some elevated rail on all of our light rail lines. The idea of an elevated railway down the LA river is just cool.
I’m reminded of the Simpsons episode: Monorail! Monorail! Monorail! Monorail! Is there a chance the track could bend? Not on your life, my Hindu friend!
I’m not saying it’s a bad idea, it’s just so far down on anyone’s priority list that it will likely never go anywhere. Plus, someone will probably discover that the rare, endangered gill-livered kangaroo ratfish lives in the river, and the whole thing will have to be scrapped.
I lived in Seattle for a year, and the monorail there was something of a local joke. In Seattle Magazine’s hunt for a new city slogan, someone wrote in: “Seattle! Our monorail has three stops!”
Fred: As a wheelchair user, I can’t currently conceive as to what the accessibility barrier is to El’s. Having said that, current existing El’s are HORRIFIC for disability; Philadelphia and Chicago are a sick joke, and New York’s elevated lines are uniformly inaccessible; all three have a handful of stations that are accessible, it’s a shot in the dark as to whether or not you’re actually going to get where you’re going. But that’s because El’s seem to never be renovated (This, sadly, isn’t an exaggeration) and thus never bring themselves under the ADA. New construction is under the ADA from the moment someone puts pen to napkin.
Having said that, an El, with some exceptions, is poor long-term planning. A subway can be easily built around, especially one like LA’s, which is fairly far underground compared to some of the New York lines which are near the surface, or worse yet Boston’s “subway,” which runs substantially on the surface (orange and blue lines especially). Future development along Vermont and Hollywood will proceed seamlessly, but next to an elevated line, you have tons of mitigation issues. Surface and El lines are also especially susceptible to weather, but that’s not an LA problem so much due to our lovely weather.
The big reason that I see to not build an El is that you almost always have buyers’ remorse immediately after construction. It makes area development and redevelopment difficult, it blights the street under the El (the exhaust-filled air under Chicago’s Els is unbelievable), it makes modern transit-oriented planning difficult because it’s hard to connect buildings, it drastically limits platform space between buildings, and resists reconfiguration.
One thing long term planners SURELY keep in their back pocket is, if they don’t build 4 tubes between Western and Ocean, that they can always go UNDER to bore express tubes in later decades, NYC west side IRT style; you’re not going to double-stack the purple line above ground, it’d be ridiculous, like Chicago’s triple-stacked downtown streets. An El can’t be reconfigured because development surrounds it from day 1. As a result, most El’s seem to be left in various states of disrepair (Philly, Chicago, NY) or taken down and replaced by subway or at-grade service (Boston, New York). The LRT lines in LA create a somewhat different situation because, as I’ve seen (largely gold line, correct me if I’m wrong regarding the blue line), the elevated portions are in areas you don’t expect to redevelop anytime soon, not overhead major streets. But heavy elevated rail on Wilshire? I’d rather wait another 10 years than see an El come up. We’d regret it before the first day of revenue service, and it would eventually come down, like Boston’s Washington El did; the Washington El here was never adequately replaced, I’d hate to see that to a Wilshire line that we had to fight for 50 years to get in the first place.
Along the river? I’m waiting for someone to tell me why we couldn’t simply put two tracks along one of the shores (probably the south shore) of the river to allow easy routing into Union Station?) It’s an interesting idea, but I doubt it needs to be elevated.
The cost of elevated rail has increased and the cost of subway has decreased to where subway is now not only a much wiser long-term investment but cost competitive. In fact, citizens and business leaders in the suburbs of Washington D.C. have basically forced the FTA and Washington Metro to recognize the advances in tunneling going on overseas. They raised $3.5 million to bring together some of the world’s best tunneling experts and one of the world’s best tunneling contractors to evaluate the cost of a potential tunnel for a portion of rail currently designed as elevated. As a result of their efforts, the el will likely be re-evaluated and built as subway as a lower cost. Plenty of info here: http://www.tysonstunnel.org
Also, if you want to build a rail system quickly, subway is just much easier. Construction is underground, meaning crews could work 24-7, and construction would only be visable at the station boxes and staging areas - which are typically the same location. Plus, subway design is pretty consistent - whereas above ground construction has so many factors.
And there are quite a few problems I can see with erecting els (whether el rail or monorail) in the middle of our flood channels.
Cool, thanks for the info Damien. And I can definitely see problems with the ideas presented in this video, but it opened my mind to thinking about some different possibilities.
Hey I love out of the box ideas. It’s just unfortunate that most monorail backers, (and if these are the guys who were at the Santa Monica Car-free Expo they’re a part of that segment of monorail people), they’re unwilling to sit down and have an honest and logical discussion about the blatant technical shortcomings of monorails.
Wow Damien–where did you dig that DC info from?
I’m what you call a transit nerd Jason. I read everything I can get my hands on.
“we could have a monorail up and running in five years”
ok, cool, just do that.
btw - the overhead animation of the monorail looks like a turd floating down the river. sounds like that could be some forshadowing…
hmmm, my last comment sounded kinda cynical. So I want to say I’m all for any and all rail and would pay a tax on my morning coffee if it meant greater rail coverage.
that’s all.
OK, I give up to the wisdom of the underground crowd.
The problem with monorail is fundamental: it offers no economic or performance advantage over conventional dual rail.
It’s one rail versus two, not monorail versus light rail, subway or elevated.
If monorail could show any of its purported benefits, more monorails would have been built instead of being confined to amusement parks.