Seattle Axes Monorail Project

Sokie writes "This afternoon the Seattle City Council passed a resolution advocating the terminiation of the Seattle Monorail Project. This follows a recent recommendation by the mayor that the project be scrapped. Lacking city support, the project looks to be dead and the city council will request that the state legislature formally terminate the project during their next session. City councilman Richard Conlin noted that the $1 million per week tax collection required by the SMP would be enough to eliminate fares on the city's bus network."

It's actually a little more complicated than that

[neile]

Once the city council backed the mayor to withdraw support, the monoral project was forced to put a measure on the upcoming November ballot so Seattle citizens can vote a fifth time on the monorail project. This time they're being offered the option of a 10-mile long route (as opposed to the original 14-mile route) that would (only) cost $5B. This whole mess started when it was discovered that the original route would wind up costing $11B to build.

The Seattle PI had a good article [nwsource.com] on the latest developments in the paper yesterday.

Gotta wonder if the submitter read the article

[Raleel]

1) The Seattle Monorail Project approved a measure to put a shortened monorail line out. I supposed that supports the word "axes".

2) The city council agreed to advocate terminating the project.

It's certainly not dead yet, but it's not looking good. It looks like the shortening was a last ditch effort to keep it alive.

It's really sad too. Seattle badly needs a train system. They have busses, but a good train would help a lot. For myself, that's one reason I prefer to go to Portland if I have the choice (about the same either way for me) despite having friends in Seattle.

good

[smoondog]

The monorail was a bad idea. I am vigorously supportive of rapid transit. But in this case there are problems. The elevation would block views, it wouldn't be that fast, it was very expensive, and would implicitly divert funds from light rail (a better idea). seattle has a long history of bad urban planning I'm glad that light rail is going forward and this isn't.

-Sean (OutdoorDB [outdoordb.org]) - The Outdoor Wiki

Obligatory Simpsons video

[The Hobo]

The name's Lanley.. Lyle Lanley.. [uwaterloo.ca]

From one of my previous comments:

Firefox Users: If the WMV doesn't work, try going tools, options, downloads, and on the bottom right click plugins, uncheck wmv, and if you don't want pdfs opening in firefox (meaning download first THEN open, I prefer this method, always faster and more stable) then uncheck pdf and anything else you don't want opening in firefox

Not exactly accurate....

[Multispin]

The project isn't exactly dead...but it is on the ropes.

A measure will be on the Nov8th ballot authorizing the project to build a slightly shorter line instead of the original 14mile plan. If the voters approve that measure, things start moving again (hopefully with strong support from the city government).

Note that the regional transit agency (SoundTransit) made a verbal promiss when we approved their tax. They ended up deciding to produce a much shorter line. Hopefully people will remember that.

Re:Not suprising

[tigersaw]

Actually, there is in fact great interest for building rail transit in Seattle, the Monorail was just doomed from the start by poor management and poor planning. However, the Sound Transit Light Rail [soundtransit.org] is chugging along just fine, and with any luck will complete its own line and supercede that which the monorail would have occupied in the near(ish) future.

I am new to Seattle, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I moved to Seattle 6 months ago, so I'm new in the area. However, this entire monorail thing never stuck me as a very good thing. The taxation is quite large - I paid $200 for my car, which is a 2001. I know some people who has to pay over $500 for their newer cars. Imagine everyone in the Seattle-area paying this tax, and yet the project could not come up with a definite financing and budget plan. The numbers kept on going higher and higher, to over $10B for a 14 mile monorail with not an overwhelming number of stations. And they were going to charge fares once up and running..!

Seattle has an excellent metro system that already serves downtown. I think it would be far cheaper and more effective to try to boost the ridership of the metro and encourage people to stop driving to downtown. The building a monorail almost sounded as if it should be done for the sake of building one. Yes, voters approved it 4 times... But I don't think many people realize how absurd it is that a project of this magnitude cannot come up with a proper estimate after all these years and studies.

Third cancellation's the charm?

[flamingweasel]

For those not following along at home, this is at least the third time this has happened (if I'm remembering correctly). The city keeps passing ballot measures, and the city council keeps dissolving the project a year or two later. You'd think, after the third ballot passed, that the city council would understand that this is very much the will of the people. I guess not.

Reading the article, it sounds like more of the same old "it can't possible work here" syndrome that infects every Seattle public work. I've been out of Seattle for a couple years -- has the light rail laid one section of track, yet? Both the monorail and the light rail projects for the region have been in development hell for at least 10 years, with seemingly no progress made. The excuse I remember hearing most often was that the Puget sound region was so different from anywhere else in the world that light rail / monorail works.

Re:Monorail fixation

[Martin Blank]

They're supposed to be:

• Quieter -- They use non-metallic wheels, often on a non-metallic surface, though I don't know if this applies to high-speed monorails.
  
• Aesthetically pleasing -- Since they are usually on raised structures, they use less surface space, don't interfere as much with foot or vehicle traffic, and the rails and their supports can be made to look nice.
  
• Safer -- They're relatively hard to derail, and since the rails don't usually run at ground level, there are fewer things to hit.
  
• Less expensive in the long run -- Not sure how this works out, since I've not seen the economics of monorails.

I can see the point of the proponents, but US transportation management does not have a good record of building expensive things now and having them operate less expensively later.

Scrapped? The article didn't say that.

[l0ungeb0y]

The first sentence of the article:
The Seattle Monorail Project board has just approved a Nov. 8 ballot measure to shorten the proposed line, and run it from the Alaska Junction in West Seattle to West Dravus Street in Interbay.

Another day another story posted with a summary that can only be described as completely wrong.

Reading the summary did make me laugh though, when I left Seattle for a real city (SF) back in 2001, the Monorail project had already been started up and construction had commenced. So if they pull out now, they could very well end up having a several hundred million dollar infrastructure sitting there to rot -- and rotting quite promenently as they situated it through very busy streets.

But it might be possible that by shortening the scope of work, the contractors would pull out. And then the Monorail project could very well be as good as dead.

Personally, while I thought the monorail project was cool, I never really understood why the hell they needed it. They already have a top-notch bus system and the idea of extending the 1962 Worlds Fair Monorail [imdb.com] into a city wide service seems rather superflous.

Christ on a stick!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm in Seattle. We voted *yes* on this baby FOUR TIMES.

We also voted no on a new stadium, twice. ..we got the stadium, but not the monorail.

Re:Monorail...

[ScuzzMonkey]

He would have been more correct to say that Western Washington carries the rest of the state on its tax base--and that's absolutely true. As is that Western Washington is more heavily urbanized than Eastern Washington. I don't have a discrete breakdown on the rural/urban taxation and spending breakdown for the west side of the state, but in general it's not true that the rural areas of the state pay more back than the receive in funding... a lot of dollars from the Western Washington tax base flow back over the mountains to subsidize the rural East side of the state.

Check some of the research that has been done on all the "51st State" proposals for combining North Idaho and Eastern Washington and leaving the West side of the state stand alone. You'll be surprised where the money actually comes from and goes to around here, and it's definitely not what you would assume.

Re:Monorail...

[canadian_right]

You are wrong. Urban areas subsidize rual areas.

Cities, due to their density have much lower tranportation costs. It is much cheaper, per person, to get water and gas services to a single apartment building than 100 rural farms, or even 100 suburban homes. Virtually anything done in a city is cheaper per person than it is in rural areas.

Urban taxes pay for the network of roads and highways that make suburbs possible. Urban taxes pay the farm subsidizes. Urban taxes pay for public transit outside of cities. Urban taxes pay for rural schools and hospitals.

http://www.ewg.org/reports/gastaxlosers/analysis.p hp [ewg.org]
http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/Infrastructure/ov erview.htm [usda.gov]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2005/07/05/AR2005070500594.html [washingtonpost.com]
http://www.techliberation.com/archives/015244.php [techliberation.com]
http://www.blueoregon.com/2005/03/joined_at_the_h. html [blueoregon.com]

Re:New York DOES have a monorail

[Politburo]

AirTrain JFK is elevated light rail, not monorail. AirTrain Newark is a monorail.

Re:taxation never drops

[1u3hr]

It pales in comparison to the thousands of dollars per person which is spent every year to subsidize automobile usage. We should eliminate all of these subsidies and let the free market dictate which transit methods are used.

The only roads free markets will build are toll roads. If not, then the full costs of land, construction and maintenance of road and parking facilites would have to be billed on auto users, simplest perhaps as a gasoline tax, which would be unfair, but encourage fuel efficiency.

Re:What did Frasier Crane get stuck in?

[Cromac]

I thought Seattle already had a monorail.

It's about 1 mile long and only goes from the north end of down town a short ways south, "mass transit" it isn't. It's a tourist attraction that needs a $100,000,000 woth of repairs and retrofitting.

Re:Monorail...

[Dirtside]

Rural areas have fewer transportation needs than cities which means the transportation costs are considerably lower.

They're not lower per capita, which is the relevant value, and the one we're discussing.

Urban taxes pay the farm subsidizes.

Nope... federal.

Er... where do you think federal taxes come from?

screw the monorail

[crojack]

we're getting an aerial tram http://www.portlandtram.com/thedesign.htm [portlandtram.com] oh and our light rail system works pretty durn good too.

Re:Mostly right

[Midnight Thunder]

You don't need to limit yourself to one rail to provide automation. Some of the existing implementations include:
  - Vancouver Skytrain [trailcanada.com]
  - Kuala Lumpur light rail [railway-technology.com]
  - Singapore metro system [urbanrail.net]
I have seen these first hand, from my travels, and can say that they work very well without having a driver.
 

Re:Monorail fixation

[Orion_]

[most of long anti-light rail diatribe deleted]

I seem to recall that building monorail is 1/10 the cost per mile. ... I think the overall budget for the 14 mile light rail project is something like $2.4 Billion. The city officials love it.... You couldn't kill the light rail project any more than you could kill the "big dig" in Boston... It's all about pork.... That's exactly why I like the monorail and hate the light rail. Light rail is going to be 10 times more expensive and doesn't even span a major traffic route! Nothing's getting solved here in Seattle by building it and nobody's going to use it.

Monorail: $11.4 billion / 14 miles (SMP's June financing plan, see this Seattle P-I article [nwsource.com])
Light rail: $2.4 billion / 14 miles (your figures, corroborated by Sound Transit [soundtransit.org])

So ... how, exactly, is light rail 10 times more expensive per mile?

And how does the light rail line, which runs along I-5, not "span a major traffic route"? Do you really think that nobody in Rainier Valley or Tukwila needs to commute to downtown Seattle, or that nobody needs to get to or from the airports?

And those four times we voted for the monorail? That was before anybody knew that the monorail officials were planning on paying for the line by selling 50-year junk bonds.

Re:Monorail...

[Basehart]

"I thought monorails were supposed to be on of the cheap(er) forms of mass transit."

The cost of the actual hardware - trains, tracks, stations - isn't so much the issue here as the endless meetings, the bureaucracy.

Being on the monorail planning board became a job for a lot of people, and you've got to wonder how motivated somebody is to get something done when ultimately they'll be out of a job when it's done!

It looks to me like these particular bureaucrats did a great job. They strung it out as long as possible before the plug was pulled.

What pisses me off it that I paid an extra $180 on my car tabs this year to help keep those fuckers fed.

Re:Monorail fixation

[Reverberant]

So, does Sound Transit also pay you to spread uninformed FUD, or do you do that on your own time?

Someone didn't get their naptime today....

The monorail board released specs on the decibels created by the new monorail. Can you comment on those?

The info from the monorail FEIS site [elevated.org] (based on measurements of the Walt Disney World monorail) indicates that the monorail (at 40 mph) is a bit quieter than "rail transit" (at 50 mph) - the specifics aren't very clear and I don't know if they're comparing apples to apples (the technical appendix doesn't seem to clear things up). On the other hand, FTA [bts.gov] says that monorails are about the same, or a bit louder than LRT - this info is based on a survey of several systems (and peer reviewed).

Best case: it's a wash. Worse case? Well compare the existing monorail to the Portland Max and decide for yourself.

And for comparisons, I can barely stand to *be* in the underground stations in Chicago when the El comes screeching in.

The El isn't light rail - the El bears about as much relationship to modern light rail as the '64 impala does to the Prius.

Re:Monorail fixation

[Reverberant]

Not saying wheels don't make noise, but AFAIK most highway noise comes from cars' engines, not the wheels.

For autos above 30 mph on level roads, wheel/road noise dominates. For medium and heavy trucks, it tends to be an almost even mix of exhaust/stack noise and wheel/road noise. For trucks going uphill, (I think) engine noise dominates.

More info in the Traffic Noise Model Technical Manual [dot.gov].

Aeromovel - Brazilian similar idea

[fmobus]

Aeromóvel [64.143.1.195] is a similar idea (eco-friendly elevated trains) that has been invented during the 80's in Brazil. There is a test track in Porto Alegre and a comercial implementation in an ecological park in Jakarta, Indonesia.

The main point in Aeromovel is rational use of vertical space: Digging the ground (subways) is too expensive for Brazilian reality and building trains along the streets creates "walls" in city's mobility. The Aeromovel then could be built over bus corridors (already existing in most of Porto Alegre's main avenues), thus avoiding competing with buses.

Re:Monorail...

[Basehart]

It would be a mistake to think of the Seattle Monorail system as being comparable to DC's Metro, Vancouver's Light Rail, San Francisco's BART, London's Underground Etc Etc because it ended up becoming just a single line from Ballard (nowhere) to West Seattle (nowhere) with downtown Seattle in the middle.

If you didn't live in or near either of these destinations the chances are you'd never use the system, or even see it for that matter.

There is, however, a light rail system in the process of actually being built which will move a lot more people to and from a lot more places.

They're actually closing down the bus tunnels in downtown Seattle for two years, starting this week, to make it ready to accept these new light rail vehicles.

The unfortunate part is that there are already light rail tracks embedded in the hardened concrete of these tunnels, but it all has to be dug up and replaced because the existing track isn't compatible with the above ground system they started bulding already.

Go figure!

Re:Monorail fixation

[Reverberant]

I've lived near the Seattle monorail, the Chicago el, and a regular set of train tracks.

None of which are representative of LRT. To have a better sense of light rail, go see DART [dart.org], Houston METRO [ridemetro.org], Salt Lake City UTA [rideuta.com], St. Louis Metrolink [metrostlouis.org], San Francisco MUNI [sfmuni.com], Santa Clara VTA [vta.org], Philadelphia SEPTA [septa.org], Portland Max [trimet.org], Baltimore MARC [mtamaryland.com], and so on.

Second, I'd much rather move back under the whoosh of the monorail than the clankety-clack of the el or train tracks.

Jointed tracks cause the "clickety-clack" most people are familiar with. Modern systems use Continuously welded rail [wikipedia.org] to solve this problem.

I'm not surprised at all to see light rail evangelists spreading FUD

Referring to me? I'm for transit in all its forms (bus/BRT, LRT, heavy rail, monorail, even maglev)but I just want to make sure people make their decisions for the right reasons.

The 'El' is not light rail!

[Reverberant]

All I can say is you know nothing about how loud steel wheels on steel rails are.

I've consulted on rail transit & freight rail noise issues in 26 states, one U.S. territory, and 2 countries. My analyses have withstood scrutiny by college professors (including one nobel prize winner), other consultants, and many lawsuits. I've contributed to national rail noise standards and I've trained state officials in transit noise control on behalf of FTA. I've presented info on noise & vibration analysis at national conferences, and I have two transit noise-related papers that will be published in refereed acoustics journals over the next year.

In short, I know a lot about "how loud steel wheels on steel rails are."

For the 3rd time, the Chicago El is not light rail - the trains are longer, heavier, faster, and more frequent, all of which make them louder than typical light rail systems. I'm also willing to bet that the age and maintenance on the El is a significant contributer to its perceived loudness.

Since you live in Seattle, take a drive down to Portland and have a listen to the Portland Max LRT system. Hopefully you'll see what I'm talking about.