[sustran] Chennai monorail controversy

[eric.britton]

The history of monorails fiascos is so long, so rocambolesque (is that a
word in English? .. otherwise think Cervantes),  and so without real
exception that one wonders about our collective memory. I started looking at
them in the context of my first world transport technology survey in 1969
which gave me an opportunity to kick their wheels in half a dozen places,
and yes! I did have several months of thinking maybe they had a place in the
future of our cities.  But these are the sins of a foolish youth, and how in
the world could any reasonably informed sapient person give in to the crude
disinformation machine and sweetheart deals that the monorail lobby has come
up with in city after city around the world.  Oh dear.

 


So for your reading pleasure, just below the couple of exchanges that have
introduced this hot topic, I reproduce the text of "Back to the Future:
Which way is the new Las Vegas Monorail heading?", by Wayne Curtis 


 


;-)


 

 

 

 

-----Original Message-----
 [mailto:sustran-discuss-bounces+eric.britton=ecoplan.org at list.jca.apc.org]
On Behalf Of Eric Bruun
Sent: Tuesday, February 07, 2006 3:26 AM



I would suggest that concerned individuals have a look at the Seattle
Monorail fiasco. It shouldn't be hard to follow if one goes to the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer and Seattle Times websites and does an archival search.

 

Eric Bruun

 

 

-----Original Message-----

>From: John Ernst <itdpasia at adelphia.net>

>Sent: Feb 6, 2006 1:11 PM

>Subject: [sustran] Re: Chennai monorail controversy

>

>The experience in Chennai appears to be 

>increasingly common in the larger Asian 

>cities.  Following some initial work by ITDP, 

>Hyderabad was considering a BRT system, but 

>monorail and rail companies quickly came in with enticing proposals.

>

>Typically, these companies overestimate demand 

>and promise a totally self-sustaining system 

>running with only private investment.  Though 

>untrue, the promise is still appealing to governments.

>

>After one false start, Jakarta had a privately 

>financed monorail start construction.  But the 

>company soon came to the government asking for a 

>subsidy, then stopped construction.  The governor 

>set a deadline of 6 days ago for the company to 

>get started again or he would look for yet another set of investors...

>

>It seems monorail is an easy dream to sell, a hard one to fulfill.

>

>Best,

>John

>

>At 12:18 AM 2/6/2006, Paul Barter wrote:

>>content-class: urn:content-classes:message

>>Content-Type: multipart/alternative;

>>         boundary="----_=_NextPart_001_01C62AED.77CA1878"

>>

>>Some of you may be interested to know that 

>>Chennai (formerly Madras) in India is in the 

>>midst of a heated controversy over public transport.

>>

>>The Tamil Nadu state government decision to opt 

>>for a huge monorail network is the issue.

>>See 

>><http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=chennai+monorail&btnG=Search+N
ews>http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=chennai+btnG=Search+News 

>>for the latest.

>>

>>Both 'Metro' supporters and BRT supporters seem 

>>to be weighing in (with the heavy rail 

>>supporters louder and more influential it seems).

>>

>><http://www.hindu.com/2006/02/03/stories/2006020315440700.htm>http://www.h
indu.com/2006/02/03/stories/2006020315440700.htm 

>>(Monorail plan ill-advised: Sreedharan)

>>"The Tamil Nadu Government's decision to go for 

>>monorail for Chennai city to meet its growing 

>>traffic needs is most `unfortunate' as it will 

>>not help meet the transport requirement of city 

>>commuters," says Delhi Metro Rail Corporation managing director E.
Sreedharan.

>>

>>Already the State had burnt its fingers with the 

>>"ill-advised" mass rapid transit system (MRTS) 

>>and the monorail would be its another 

>>"ill-advised venture," he said in a letter to the State Government.

>>

>>The State, which had asked the DMRC to submit a 

>>comprehensive report for a rail based metro 

>>system for Chennai, dashed off a letter to the 

>>Corporation recently asking it to stop all its investigations and surveys.

>>

>>Expressing surprise over the decision, Mr. 

>>Sreedharan suspected that the State had been 

>>"influenced by monorail lobby with its tall 

>>claims and false promises." The lobby, the 

>>letter noted, had already stalled the metro project in Bangalore. .

>>

>>or 

>><http://www.hindu.com/2006/01/29/stories/2006012901640500.htm>http://www.h
indu.com/2006/01/29/stories/2006012901640500.htm 

>>(Divergent views emerge on utility of monorail project)

>>

>>Any comments?

>>

>>Paul

>>

>>Paul A. Barter  

 

 

 


Back to the Future



Which way is the new Las Vegas Monorail heading? 

by Wayne Curtis 

..... 

LLas Vegas is the Los Alamos of urban design, the nation's leading
laboratory for experimenting with how our cities will look and function a
half century from now. Among the questions currently under investigation:
How much fake do Americans want and what kinds of fake do they prefer? How
high and how far can celebrity-chef franchise dining go? How will hybrid
hotel-condos actually work on a citywide level? How do you build a compact,
pedestrian-friendly city around what amounts to a short but congested
ten-lane highway? 

Howard Hughes was right. He said Las Vegas could be a "city of the future,"
setting a course for the rest of America. (Hughes envisioned a "super
environmental" city free of smog and run by an enlightened local
government-but whatever.) When I read that Las Vegas had opened a new
monorail system last year to whisk travelers up and down the Strip, my first
thought was, Of course: all cities of the future have monorails.

My second thought was, When can I ride it? Those of us who came of age
making pilgrimages to Disney's Tomorrowland know that monorails produce a
complicated nostalgia for the future. For me the very word "monorail"
triggers a slightly faded Technicolor reverie in which my back yard has its
own helipad and my wife, Zorga, wears a silver body suit and sports a
stiffly epoxied hairdo that resembles an inverted chafing dish. So when I
visited Las Vegas in September, it wasn't the buffets or the baccarat tables
that lured me out of my hotel room before I had even unpacked. It was the
prospect of a monorail ride. I made my way over to the nearest station, paid
my three dollars, and hopped on the next train, uncertain whether I was
bound for the past or the future. 

This much most people agree on when it comes to monorails: they run on a
single rail. The trains can sit on top of the rail, as they do in Las Vegas,
Seattle, and the Disney theme parks, or they can be suspended underneath, as
they were at the 1964 New York World's Fair. Kim Pedersen, the founder and
president of the 4,300-member Monorail Society, is driven to distraction by
people who indiscriminately talk about "monorails" that aren't any such
thing. Seattle has a monorail, he says; Detroit, with its People Mover, does
not. Disney World has a monorail; Miami, with its Metromover (which, as
anyone can see, is just an automated, elevated bus system), clearly does
not. 

I have my own criteria for a monorail. It has a single rail, of course. But
it must also run swiftly on quiet rubber wheels right into the lobby of a
hotel or an office building. There should be a soft swooshing sound as it
slows; bonus points are awarded for a slight but discernible change in air
pressure when it arrives. The opening of the doors should be accompanied by
a soft bonging, followed by a lush female voice, at once intimate and aloof,
urging one to step smartly inside.

The Las Vegas Monorail gets mixed marks on these counts. Its cars, based on
the five-eighths-scale Alweg cars originally commissioned by Disney, are
pleasingly futuristic-not fully Jetsons, but not far from A Clockwork
Orange. Most of them are wrapped in advertising, like the buses that double
as billboards. A beguiling female voice beckoned me inside, but after the
doors closed, the spell was broken by piped-in ads for casinos, including
one in which Barry Manilow personally implored me to disembark at the
Hilton. 

Perhaps the most disappointing thing about the Las Vegas Monorail is the
route. The trains don't glide into hotel lobbies or even past
football-field-size neon signs. The platforms are behind the casinos on the
east side of the Strip, and getting to them from the west side requires a
wearying hike across traffic and through bewildering, unmarked thickets of
clanging slot machines. Once you're on board, the view out the window is
sadly quotidian. The four-mile track winds behind the hotels, affording
views mostly of parking lots, croupiers taking cigarette breaks, and vast,
sand-colored roofs dotted with HVAC domes that shimmer in the desert heat
like distant Bedouin encampments. 

And the ride is bumpy and not very fast, owing to track curves and frequent
station stops. "I have to admit, it's a little rough," said Pedersen, who
recently spent five days in Las Vegas shooting video to promote monorails in
other cities. "Especially having ridden so many Japanese monorails, which
are as smooth as glass."

Monorails have more history than you might think. A patent for the first
prototype was registered in 1821, and the first one-track passenger train
appeared in 1825, drawn by a single horse. The Philadelphia Centennial
Exposition, in 1876, featured a Victorian-looking double-decker steam
monorail, and in 1911 the first of the modern monorail cars-those that
resemble huge suppositories-made an appearance in Seattle, running on a
wooden track. 

But not until the middle of the past century did America reach the brink of
its golden Monorail Age. In 1961 Disney nearly tripled the length of its
1959 Tomorrowland monorail, to two and a half miles, and made it as much a
form of transportation as an amusement ride. A year later Seattle opened its
mile-long monorail linking downtown to the World's Fair grounds and the
Space Needle. A 1964 Saturday Evening Post article painted a glorious
picture of tomorrow: "After reaching their train via escalator, the
passengers recline in molded fiber-glass seats and gaze out large picture
windows as electric power shoots them from station to station at 90 miles
per hour." And tomorrow was nearly here. "The climate is right for a
breakthrough in urban transportation," Popular Mechanics reported at about
the same time, "and those monorail builders are just itching to show what
they can do."

So what happened?

"Well, that's the mystery," Pedersen told me. "It runs the gamut from
conspiracy theories involving oil and automobile companies to the fact that
they just haven't been looked at seriously because they've been at theme
parks and world's fairs."

I blame the future. The monorail shows that an idealized tomorrow can be
every bit as encumbering as an imperfect yesterday. The monorail was twenty
years ahead of its time, and it has been mired there ever since. It is to
mass transportation what the theremin is to the symphony-a novelty that most
people feel is best experienced once.

This vexes Pedersen, who remains convinced that monorails make good
practical sense-despite the fact that the Las Vegas Monorail has been
plagued by problems since its opening, including metal pieces that fell into
the street, trains that stopped for no apparent reason, and one that left
the station with its door open. Pedersen has also videotaped monorails in
Malaysia and Japan, and he notes that one-track elevated systems can be
installed relatively quickly and without claiming a large right-of-way in
crowded urban cores. He sees the burgeoning urban interest in trolleys and
other light rail, which often blocks car lanes and contributes to
ground-level congestion, as "insane." And he wishes that people (I sense
that by "people" he means writers like me) would stop imprisoning monorails
in the future and let them come rolling into the present.

In this Pedersen has a natural ally in Curtis Myles, the president and chief
executive officer of the Las Vegas Monorail Company. I stopped by to visit
Myles at the monorail's office, a few blocks east of the Strip, and found
that he, like Pedersen, was quite optimistic, perhaps largely because he'd
been on the job only two months. A former executive with the Regional
Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada, Myles sees the monorail as the
last best hope for unknotting the Gordian traffic that plagues the Strip.
Several times during our meeting he bounded up to a wall-mounted satellite
photo of the resort corridor to show the several new routes he hopes to
build, glossing over the fact that ridership so far had fallen short of
projections. The train will go from the existing terminus to the airport, he
said, and then along the west side of the Strip, through the MGM Mirage's
new $5 billion Project CityCenter, and onward. "It has the potential to
really address what is probably going to be the biggest problem this valley
faces, which is getting people from the airport to the resort hotels," he
told me. "I don't think people really appreciate how bad that problem is
going to be." 

This all sounded important, and I tried to focus on what he was saying. It
was difficult. The second-floor conference room in which we sat was just
yards from the elevated track, and every few minutes a monorail would streak
past cinematically, filling the window with the canary-yellow cars of the
Nextel train, or the Martian-green cars of Star Trek: The Experience's Borg
Invasion 4D. (Resistance is futile, they read. You will be assimilated.) It
brought to mind Alvy Singer's home under the Coney Island roller coaster in
Annie Hall. Each time, I looked away from Myles and stared at the trains. He
noticed. "I get a review of my job performance every six minutes," he said.

It was more than that. Sitting in the quiet office with the monorail
whispering past, I was wholly transported to another time. Here was the
future-just as I remembered it.


The URL for this page is
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200512/vegas-monorails.

 

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