The monorail is extraordinary in that it can be built elsewhere and then carried in and installed in mid-street with little confusion and no destruction of businesses. In a matter of a few months, a line could be built from Long Beach all the way along Western Avenue to the mountains with little disturbance to citizens and no threat to local businesses.

Compared to the heavy elevateds of the past, the monorail is virtually soundless. Anyone who has ridden the Disneyland or Seattle monorails knows how quietly they move.

They also have been virtually accident-free. The history of the monorail shows few collisions or fatalities.If we constructed monorails running north and south on Vermont, Western, Crenshaw and Broadway, and similar lines running east and west on Washington, Pico, Wilshire, Santa Monica and Sunset, we would have provided a proper cross section of transportation, allowing people to move anywhere in our city at any time.

There you have it. As soon as possible, we must call in one of the world's monorail-building companies to see what could be done so that the first ones could be in position by the end of the year to help our huddled traffic masses yearning to travel freely.

The freeway is the past, the monorail is our future, above and beyond.

My 6-year-old son is a train nut, so for that reason alone I'd love to see a major metropolitan area build a real monorail system, not the small-scale demonstator system such as in Seattle and the Disney parks, or the limited systems in use at many airports, such as Newark. On top of that, LA could obviously use an effective mass-transit system that goes to all the places that people want to go, but color me unconvinced by Bradbury's op-ed, which smacks more of Ain't I a clever visionary rather than a serious attempt to lay out the benefits and drawback of monorails in Southern California.

Bradbury really glosses over the problems inherent in having elevated tracks running through a neighborhood, even if the structure of modern monorail tracks is less bulky and shadow-making than old-fashioned "els" such as we have here in New York and in Chicago. Where those els went, blight followed, but perhaps it would be different with the monorails. And accident free? The monorail in Seattle was closed down when I was last there because of an accident, and I just read that it's down again. That may be a specific problem with the Seattle system, but there's no reason to suspect that a monorail will be any more or any less accident-prone than any other mass-transportation system. Where there are motors and heavy things moving, there will be accidents.

But the biggest problem with his suggestion is one he doesn't really go into, that for a mass transit system for Los Angeles to be effective and reduce car trips significantly, it has to go to a lot of places. Because LA is so spread out, because there is not just one city center but many of them, because people live in residential areas all over the place, and then have to get to work all over the place, an effective transportation system really has to have the capability of going to all those places in order to make it reasonable for people to give up their cars.

Throwing up a couple of monorail lines, even if they go to the most popular destinations, is not likely to have any more effect on LA's abysmal street traffic problem than the new subway has, because it won't go all the places where people need to go, and as long as there's at least one destination in a day's itinerary (drop kids off at school, go to work, have lunch with friends, pick up kids and bring to dance lessons, go grocery shopping, home) which can't be reached by mass transit, people will use their cars because to do so is not only inconvenient, it's impractical.

LA's sprawling nature was long ago defined by the railroads, then the street car system, then the freeway system which replaced it, and that sprawl is an integral part of its identity now. The only kind of mass transit system which can save LA is one which adaquetely services that sprawl, by mirroring the routes that the railroads, street cars and freeways put down -- and even then the immense size of the city mitigates against it, since the chances are that the place you're going to, even if it's in the general vicinity of a monorail stop, is not going to be within walking distance.

I'm not an Angeleno, so I'm not in a position to say that I'm agin' it -- besides, I'm not really against it at all, I would just like to see some kind of proposal that's real and had even a marginal chance of success. LA really does badly need some kind of mass transit to take the stress off of the overloaded streets and freeways, but Bradbury's idea sounds like a non-starter to me.

[via Boing Boing]