Heyyyyy .... we're definitely smarter than the folks in Ogdenville, North Haverbrook and those boobs in Brockaway.

Right!

Signed,
Lyle Langley

It put them on the map!

Seriously LA needs some traffic help and a overhead monorail is much cheaper than digging subways.

Ray Bradbury is no more a great intellect than he is a great writer. You won't solve gridlock with trains -- if people don't want to take public transit, the system will just be a pretty, empty, white-elephant. A cultural shift is required.

Here's the real traffic problem in LA - there's a cult of self in the city. Many living there think of themselves as too important to take mass-transit, even if it was available.

Even if efficient public transit was available in LA, people wouldn't take it because:

a> it's common.
(Spoken through your bottom teeth, a la Mr. Howe)

b> it involves waiting.
(Which is somehow qualitatively different from being "held up in traffic.")

c> if the transit system reduces traffic on the roads, they should be the ones enjoying driving on the newly de-congested highway system.

("Oh, I'm going to take the bus so some other turkey can drive on the roads I pay for with my taxes?")

It's a pity monorails have such a bad reputation - thinking about the Simpson's episode. But, I happen to think the pople in LA will, in fact, ride transit if it actually went anywhere.

The Red Line is actually really fast, and really nice. If it went all the way down Wilshire to SM I am 100% convinced it would be packed all the time - there's no reason you can't bring it up from underground and lay elevated tracks like a Monorail, but use the same trains.

Likewise, extend the Red Line to the burbank airport and you've got another big winner. Costs a fortune, but some of that LAX expnasion money might make sense spent there to relive conjestion.

The Blue Line is heavily used already and goes pretty fast.

The Orange line (a bus rapid transit line) looks like it's going to be well used - and it's a great stepping stone that might eventuallly become an extended Red Line through SF valley...

LAX is pathetically served by the Green Line which dosn't even make it all the way to the airport because the parking lot operators lobbied to truncate it at some distant lot from where you have to take a shuttle - totally lame.

Anyway, it dosn't take a monorail, it takes efficient leadership and public outcry.

Finally, LA is much much denser than people think. a lot of it is plenty dense enough to support transit, the options just need to be more attractive.

Ask someone in Miami if they have ever taken the monorail there!

This is where you go, "there is a monorail in Miami."

Then I go, "exactly."

LA does have one of the most extensive public transport systems ever. The routes I have taken are always jam packed, so people do use them.

Brazil is a great model. Approximately 100,000 buses are in operation in Brazil, providing 60 million passenger trips per day. While much of the character of Brazil's bus service is similar to that of many urban areas in the United States, Brazil has been a leader in the development of high-performance bus services. In particular, the city of Curitiba has received international recognition for its exclusive bus corridors, and has helped spur the Federal Transit Administration's recent interest in Bus Rapid Transit applications in the United States. Word.

http://www.skytran.net

for the price of putting up a monolithic monorail or lightrail you can put up a grid of lite wieght 2 person pods that travel much faster than traffic and get you close to door to door much faster than a car can.

LA is in dire need of a better form of tranportation. We rode their shitty form of a subway recently and were so depressed by everything around us. LA needs monorails for the working people.

http://www.schwebebahn.de/EN/html/fs_start.htm

Running for more than 105 years

Yeah, monorails are great! We voted for them umpteen times here in Seattle. Unfortunately, the last time was a vote to kill the project. Too many special interests against it and no one could come up with a decent plan to finance it. It did work in Las Vegas however - all privately funded.

actualy it's the freeway that is the "white elephant" (that's almost a pun as it applies in several contexts)
along with the combination of the private passinger automobile and cities. i know it's a gratuitous conventionality the average joe sixpack can't seem to think outside of, but he's going to have to get used to is sooner or later. the oil is going to run out and we'll all be better off the sooner it does.
the only problems with guideway based systems as we know then are directly derivative of diseconomies of excessive scale, none of which are by any means intrinsic to the concept.
i'm not denying that emotional attatchment to familiar assumptions is a fact of political life. but another fact of the greater universe is that all things end, or at least faide into impracticality, while other things, temporarily eclipsed by them, wait in the wings for a chance to be reinvented in more practical and usefull ways.
rubber tyre on pavement doesn't use energy all that effeciently and when the day comes all there is are batteries and noncombustive ways of recharging them, that's going to be a majore factore.
the good citizens of autotropolis will undoubtedly retain their deathgrip on their chosen objects of worship for as long as they're able to be censored from getting a grip on anything else, good sense included.

=^^=
.../\...

Ray Bradbury is the real deal. He saw the future and it is us. LA risks stalling into a gridlock of inefficiency and irrelevance if it does not make the wholehearted commitment to a train system that is meaninful... Like connections into LAX and Burbank, adequate transit security at all hours, and adequate coverage of the denser areas with well thought out satellite links on the fringes and with coordinating feeder buses. The longer we wait, the worse, more expensive and more complex everthing will become.

Why a monorail and not an
elevated train. Technology that is well known and works an elevated train would be more reliable than a brand new engineered monorail. cheaper too.

We already have a monorail system here in LA... hasn't anyone ever been to Disneyland??? I personally prefer the idea of switching to LEV's for local travel and short commutes. That alone would take a huge number of autos off the road.

Ray Bradbury is a very smart person who has a vision of what the future could be and monorails is it.

But like all other great ideas of putting in monorails, it is the polities and special interest that kill these projects.

They want us to believe that it is new technology and has not proven itself, well as others have said Disneyland and Disneyworld have been using them for 40 years and they have worked fine.

Digging new subways, light rails or building wider highways will never solve your problems. The cost of these systems are far higher then monorails, but special interest fudge these numbers.

LA should think of Monorails that travel down the middle of the highways from downtown LA as spokes with multiple urban ring monorails connecting them.

We have built our homes and businesses around the highways, so building monorails that use the highway ROW, just makes common sense.

You should also think of Meglev from SD to LA to SF via I-5

But before any of this can happen, the highway industry needs to be convinced that it is in their best interest to support it and it will create additional jobs for them.

http://www.bostonforum.com/display_topic.php?topic_id=201#201

DRG
New Hampshire

La sucks move to New York and take the A train.

A Monorail is the smartest form of mass trans. to build.

It is enviornment friendly, far CHEAPER than Subways, and PROVEN superior to Subways, Lt.rail (accident prone) and DUMB BUSES!

You are WRONG that people in LA won't take public trans. They won't STUPID, PULLOUTING, STOP and GO BUSES!

We once had the largest trolley system in the WORLD!

I say BUILD IT! (yesterday)