BACK TO THE FUTURE

CLOSE YOUR EYES AND IMAGINE THE city of the future. What do you see? People wearing Star Trek suits, Tall, slender buildings. But what’s that contraption speeding between the buildings? Why, it’s a monorail whizzing by!

Admit it. You saw a monorail. At the very least, you envisioned something that looked an awful lot like the sloped-nose monorail trains that Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Walt Disney made famous at Disney World and Disneyland. Almost anyone’s vision of a futuristic metropolis seems to have those fast-moving trains scooting along on high stilts.

So if you saw a monorail, rest assured that your imagination isn’t the only one that’s filled with these mystical machines. After voters buried Dallas Area Rapid Transit’s vision of the future June 25, many in Dallas began touting monorails. DART officials, faced with the chore of regaining public support, have promised to look at any technology that will do the transit job in Dallas-and that includes monorail. This time around, the pros and cons, assets and liabilities of monorail are going to get a thorough hearing.



FORMER DALLAS CITY COUNCIL MEMBER Max Goldblatt, a tireless proponent of monorail, sits in retirement and watches DART’s debacle with more than passing interest. In 1982, he tried to convince the city of Dallas to support a monorail. He forced the city to study the idea, but the report didn’t give that technology the boost he wanted. DART chose to build a light rail system and killed the monorail idea. Or so DART thought. Goldblatt, whose monorail monomania was largely ignored by DART, finds his pet project’s prospects looking very much alive all of a sudden.

“I don’t think they ever looked better,” Goldblatt says. “DART has got its tail in a crack. They’re trying to save their hides, and I think they’re going to be willing to listen.”

Max touts many advantages to the monorail, but the argument almost always gets back to the same attribute-the gut-level appeal that monorail’s futuristic image holds for the public. Goldblatt has argued for years that the transit system needs the romance, the allure of monorail to capture the people’s imaginations. But the monorail debate is about to grow beyond the shadow of its eccentric popularizer. Max may have written the words, but a chorus of others has picked up the refrain.

The light rail system DART has heretofore embraced “is a modification of 19th-century technology,” says DART board member Jim Buerger, one of those who wants DART to study monorail anew. “We’re going into the 21st century, and monorail is more indicative of the future and the image the people of the Dallas area have about this city. They don’t have the image of yesterday in this city; they have the image of tomorrow. Monorail has sizzle. It’s sexy.”

“As somebody said, DART is down right now and it needs something like a steak that has a sizzle in it,” agrees former DART board chairman David McCall III, continuing the frying-pan metaphor. “Monorail has the sizzle in it. But that shouldn’t be the determining factor. It should be whether if in fact it is cheaper, if in fect the technology has improved over (he last five years so that the tracking and the switching are not the problems they were five years ago, and if in tact it can move a large number of people at a reasonable price.”

Americans and most others take their mental image of monorail from the futuristic trains that have carried visitors in Disneyland since 1959 and in Disney World since 1971. The Disney monorails are low-slung affairs that emphasize a bullet-like shape.

Despite that image, DART’s assistant executive director for transit systems development, Ron Thorstad, says that in the transportation field, monorail is anything but a science-fiction fantasy. “If you take the body of the shell off the vehicle, what you have is a very conventional technology, in fect as conventional as any of the other rapid-transit modes,” Thorstad says. “There is not anything significantly new about the hardware. I mean, the Seattle monorail has been running for decades. The Japanese monorail systems are very, very old. It’s futuristic because of the look of the vehicle, especially the Disney vehicle. It’s shaped to look fast and attractive. So the big selling point is the image and its look.”

The monorail idea came to Dallas in February 1982, courtesy of Goldblatt, who sprang his monorail idea on other council members and Robert Dedman Sr., chairman of the State Highway and Public Transportation Commission, as Dedman attempted to sell Dallas on the idea of elevated highway lanes. While Dedman promoted the elevated road as the best way to double North Central Expressway’s capacity, Goldblatt countered that a monorail would be fester, cheaper, easier, cleaner, and more beautiful.

The council voted with Dedman (a decision later retracted), but a lot of people voted with Goldblatt and his monorail. Unable to persuade other council members to authorize a monorail study, Goldblatt and supporters circulated petitions to force the study. Goldblatt collected, by his estimate, some 57,000 names, which he presented to the council in late 1982.

But Goldblatt’s petition-gathering may have had a fatal flaw. The people circulating the petition simply took any name they could get, and the lists were peppered with people who didn’t live in Dallas. What’s more, many of the signers weren’t registered voters. It would have taken Goldblatt months, even years, to check each name on the petition to make sure he had enough valid, registered voters who lived in Dallas. When the lists were presented, most observers thought he did not.

But Dallas officials also had a problem, and they knew it. Even if many of the signers weren’t registered Dallas voters, they nevertheless represented a massive outpouring of support for the monorail idea. Area governments in 1982 were launching a regional transit authority, DART, and the eventual transit plan had to be approved by voters. The politicians needed Goldblatt’s monorail supporters, just as Max needed public money for a study.

From these needs came a compromise. The transit authority and the city of Dallas agreed to fund a study-but not the study Goldblatt wanted. He had called for a specific look at the costs and advantages of building monorail along major highways so he could prove that monorail was feasible. Instead, city and DART officials forced him to accept a study that compared monorail to other technologies, such as light rail (the modem streetcars), heavy rail (like New York subways), and a Canadian technology that didn’t need train operators. The city hired a joint venture headed by two consulting companies, Lea, Elliott, McGean Inc. and DeLeuw Cather Inc., to conduct the study.

When the report came back in early 1983, it certainly didn’t satisfy Goldblatt, who felt he had been cheated. The conclusions didn’t knock monorail out of the race, but the study gave supporters of other technologies all the ammunition they needed to decide against monorail. They used it well. The DART board eventually settled on light rail, with embellishments such as wider cars and extensive tunneling to move it in the direction of the more expensive heavy rail systems. And the rest is history.



MONORAIL IS NOT NEW. THE BASIC CON-cept has been around for more than a century and a half. In the late 19th century, a German, Eugen Langen, devised a way to move his goods along a rail suspended from the ceiling of his sugar mill, then wondered why the same approach wouldn’t work for humans.

In 1901, six years after Langen’s death, his dream became reality when the north German city of Wuppertal began operating his “Schwebebahn,” the swinging railroad. Like his sacks of sugar, Langen’s monorail dangled the cargo-in this case, train cars carrying the good citizens of Wuppertal-from a rail running along an 8.2-mile-long steel framework. The train was noisy. It was a visual obstruction on the Wuppertal environment. But it worked. And eighty-seven years later, the monorail of Wuppertal is still working, clanking along at an average speed of seventeen miles per hour and a top speed of just under forty miles per hour. No serious injury has ever been attributed to the mechanical failure of the Wuppertal or any other monorail.

Monorail today usually means a different type of technology, the “straddle-beam” monorail, so called because the train’s lower portions straddle a single beam of steel or concrete. Swedish industrialist Axel L. Wenner-Gren, a tireless promoter of monorail, developed his Alweg technology (Alweg being an acronym of his name) in the Fifties, and almost all major monorail systems are offsprings of Wenner-Gren’s ideas and his Alweg firm.

A sidelight in history is that a group of Houston investors and engineers built an experimental 970-foot system in 1956 to demonstrate the feasibility of monorail. Like Wuppertal, it was suspended from an overhead rail. Wenner-Gren liked what he saw and purchased controlling interest in their firm, Monorail Inc., a year later. In 1958, Wenner-Gren and the Houston group built a new trial monorail that used the straddle-beam technology.

Wenner-Gren, however, became ill and died in 1961. The German engineers of the Alweg company withdrew their support from the company after Wenner-Gren’s death and promoted their own technology. Two of the Houston principals still push monorail through their company, Advanced Monorail Systems, but it is the Alweg group that has since made the impact.

The modern monorail era really began in Seattle with the 1962 World’s Fair. Alweg built a one-mile monorail line connecting the fair site with downtown Seattle, bringing the futuristic system firmly into the public’s attention. Alweg technology also was the base for nine Japanese monorail systems built by Hitachi since 1960, including an eight-mile line built for the 1964 World’s Fair in Tokyo and a five-mile system for the industrial city of Kita-Kyushu in 1985. The 1964 system, known as the Haneda line, is the longest monorail used for public transit, but that distinction will soon belong to the Osaka line, now under construction and longer by about a third of a mile.

The monorail option got a boost in 1984 when Disney licensed its technology to Bombardier Inc., a Canadian firm that builds transit vehicles of all kinds. Bombardier’s arrival in the monorail market has increased monorail’s credibility, many observers say. Dennis Elliott, a principal in the consulting firm Lea, Elliott, McGean, cited Bombardier’s involvement as one of the reasons the monorail technology definitely has advanced since the Dallas study in 1983.

“They have been working to ’urbanize’ the Disney monorail technology. A lot of their effort has been directed toward addressing some of the concerns we raised when we did the study for the city of Dallas, things like the doors, the height of the cars, and various safety concerns,” says Elliott, who stresses that his comments aren’t meant to endorse any technology for Dallas.

But reservations persist. The 1983 Lea, Elliott. McGean report cited a number of concerns about Hitachi and Disney monorails. First, the existing Disney monorail didn’t allow standing passengers, only sitting, and the doors opened outward rather than sliding into the train’s walls like traditional transit. Both Disney and Hitachi were promoting up-to-date technology that answered many concerns, but the new technology was still on the drawing boards. For the Disney system in particular, the study said the large number of new design components and equipment posed some risk of problems until the bugs were eliminated. Monorails couldn’t handle as many passengers as some other technologies. Ice buildup on the monorail beam could cause delays. The planners worried that the elevated monorails, with no catwalks or other access except at stations, would be tough to evacuate in an emergency. And. most importantly, it was more difficult to switch monorail trains from one track to another than for railroads.

Some of these concerns have been answered. Since the 1983 study. Hitachi has begun operating its new monorails in Kita-Kyushu, and Bombardier is about to deliver its new Mark VI monorails-with standing room, increased capacity, and sliding doors-to Disney World for testing and eventual daily service. The doubts about whether those monorails work trouble-free should be eliminated by the time Dallas makes its decision about technology.

The issue of the ice is as serious as one wants to make it. Dallas rarely has ice storms, but nobody wants his transportation system shut down at all. even for a day or two. The beams can be heated-for a price, of course. Do they need to be? It’s a trade-off of costs versus benefits.

Monorail supporters previously downplayed the need for emergency catwalks for monorails by citing its excellent safety record. Bombardier’s Transportation Group Inc. (TGI) now adopts a different stance- if officials want the catwalks, they’ll get them. That policy, which adds about a quarter million dollars per mile to (he cost of a monorail system, virtually eliminates concerns about monorail’s safety.

“Monorails have been so safe it’s unbelievable.” says Tom Stone, who joined TGI last year as president. “Before I came to the company, the tendency was to fight the walkway issue by citing the safety statistics. It’s been the safest mode of transport there is. But I decided that we’re going to change that approach. Why fight? If a walkway is required, we will provide a walkway, plain and simple.”

The issue of switching is a more serious one. Monorail proponents say there’s no problem; critics say that monorail switching may have improved but it will never be as simple and fast as for traditional rail trains. That’s because the trains sit astride a beam, and switching a car from one track to another involves moving an entire beam. Either the entire train must be switched in order to change from eastbound to westbound or vice versa, or the train must circle around on a huge, land-consuming horseshoe loop of rail. That doesn’t compare well with light and heavy rail systems in which a switch can be moved into place in one to five seconds.

So people like DART’s Ron Thorstad remain skeptical. “Although the monorail people would probably argue with this, the switching is still an issue. When you get into networking and regional rail systems and maybe five or six branches with interchanges and so forth, monorail starts to get weak.”

So, monorail is still hampered with problems or at least perceptions of shortcomings. But there are three important points in its favor. First, nearly everyone agrees that it has eliminated many drawbacks in the years since the Lea, Elliott, McGean study. Second, it can be cheaper than other types of transit. Third, nearly everyone agrees that monorail can be the right transit system for a city in the right situation.

That last caveat is especially important because the new plan of attack proposed by DART is to decide first what the problem is, then see what methods or technologies are needed to address it. In other words, the chastened DART planners will now try to define the disease before they look for the cure, possibly opting for a mix of technologies applicable to the differing needs of various traffic corridors.

DART’s new emphasis on flexible, varied solutions to transit problems is reasonable, if belated. Transportation experts have long recognized that all the technologies have their advantages and disadvantages. There is no single panacea for a city drowning in traffic; rather, each technology works best in a certain situation, but may prove a costly blunder in another. Some considerations:

● Light rail almost always is the cheapestmethod of rail transit if placed at street level.Sacramento, for example, built its eighteen-mile system for less than $10 million a mile,largely because the tracks rarely crossedover streets and never went below them. Putlight rail in tunnels or on bridges, though,and that cheap label can disappear quickly.

● Heavy rail is almost always the most expensive kind of rail transit. Heavy rail neverinterferes with traffic because it either goesover streets on bridges or beneath streets intunnels. Its tracks are “grade-separated.”Heavy rail can travel faster and better thanother modes, but at a tremendous price. It’sa logical choice in Paris and New Yorkwhere people and jobs are crowded together,but not so logical elsewhere. Los Angeles isspending more than $1 billion to tunnel fourmiles. Proposed tunnels beneath downtownDallas and three miles of North Central Expressway added hundreds of millions of dollars to the cost of the proposed DAFT rail system. The DART board’s 1985 decision to approve the tunnels did more than anything else to erode suburban confidence in the transit authority.

● Monorail has an advantage when the system must be totally or partly grade-separated. Put your transit system on a bridge, and monorail beats both light rail and heavy rail in costs. If it’s a choice between rail in tunnel or monorail on bridges, monorail wins going away. But mix up the system so it’s partly at street level and partly on bridges, and the cost-benefit analysis is not so simple.

The Lea, Elliott, McGean study estimated that a foot of elevated “guideway” would cost half as much to build for monorail as for light or heavy rail trains. There are two reasons for that. Monorail trains weigh less, so the supporting structure would not need to be so heavy. In addition, a monorail structure is less complex since the concrete beam acts as both the structural member and the guideway track. For rail trains, one has to pay for both the bridge and the trackage.

Consider the discredited ninety-three-mile DART rail system. It has four major lines leaving downtown, eventually branching into nine lines. It crosses more than a hundred streets at grade. More than seventy of its nintey-three miles would be at grade. Clearly, that system favors the light rail approach.

Now, let’s make some assumptions. First, the system we’ll actually get, whether it uses light rail, monorail, or some other technology, will have a lot fewer miles. For the foreseeable future, let’s say it will focus on the inner part of the region. Farther out from downtown Dallas, the emphasis will be on busways or other methods that don’t require tracks, beams, or trains. With those assumptions-a shorter system focused on the city’s core-monorail suddenly scores pretty well.

Why? For one thing. DART’s old plan has eight miles of tunnel and twelve miles of elevated railway within the city limits, mostly in or near downtown Dallas. If downtown business people don’t squawk too much about its unsightliness, a monorail in the air is a lot cheaper than a train in the ground. The monorail is also cheaper than other elevated transit.

A monorail will fare better against its competitors if the system remains simple- a single line or a loop where the switching is minimized. A north-south monorail crossed by an east-west monorail would not be too ungainly, since all past DART plans have required passengers to change trains at times. The monorail doesn’t work so well if each line splits off into multiple branches.

However, monorail can gain an advantage if DART has to tiptoe along a narrow right of way like a highway or street median. The support columns for a monorail guideway are narrower in diameter than columns for light or heavy rail structures. But this advantage can be overemphasized. In many cases, a strip of land wide enough for monorail is also wide enough for conventional elevated trains.

The monorail’s sleek, elongated profile is often cited as an aesthetic addition to a city. But remember, this ain’t Disneyland. The monorail cars modified for urban mass transit will be taller in order to accommodate standing passengers. The Mark VI cars that Bombardier proposes for urban transit will stand ten and a half feet tail, a full foot higher than the Mark IVs now running at Disney World. The Hitachi cars, as mentioned, are squared-off boxes that lack futuristic flair. Monorail may not be so beautiful after it grows up.

Another pressing issue is capacity, Back in 1983, planners turned thumbs down on monorail because the existing systems seemed unable to carry all the riders Dallas anticipated. Now, the evolution of monorail should remove that concern. While monorails cannot carry as many passengers an hour as heavy rail, Dallas will not be producing enough ridership to overload monorails until far into the future. The busiest DART line in the ninety-three-mile system would have carried around 4,000 to 5,000 passengers during its busiest hour. But the Kita-Kyushu line had a capacity of 7,000 passengers an hour when service was launched in 1985, and the Bombardier/Disney Mark VI trains claim the ability to carry 20,000 riders an hour. It would appear that monorail can handle the Dallas rush hour.

All this discussion still doesn’t answer the basic question: should Dallas build mono-rail? DART planner Thorstad sees monorail more as a “people mover” or shuttle technology than as the backbone for a large network. Professor Vukan Vuchic, University of Pennsylvania rail expert and proponent, thinks most analyses will favor rail, not monorail. “If you ask a strictly professional opinion, then monorail has always been found inferior to rail. But [monorail’s] image is extremely good, for some reason. People love it as the future thing. If in some cases you find that rail cannot be accepted and people will go for monorail, then your alternative is not rail versus monorail. It’s monorail or nothing.”

It’s a sure bet that the DART powers will be looking with even keener interest at the transit solutions of cities like Houston, where a light rail versus monorail debate brews. Officials have won voter approval for a twenty-mile rail system, as long as local taxpayers don’t have to pay more than $370 million of its anticipated $1 billion price tag. The Houston Metropolitan Transit Authority, better known as Metro, said before this year’s election that the system likely would be light rail, but that Metro would consider other technologies. A private group since then has proposed building an elevated system for less money and time-$850 million and five years, compared to $1 billion and twelve or thirteen years. The private group, ’ Dacoma Transit Associates, has not commit-ted to any technology, but is looking at monorail and several other automated systems. The Metro board has contracted with Lea, Elliott, McGean to come up with a technology recommendation.

And the man who started it all? While others are beginning to ponder monorail, Max Goldblatt himself has moved on to newer technology. His current love is magnetic levitation trains. Maglev technology seems simple: since magnets of the same pole repel each other, a train is lifted off its guideway when magnetic forces in the track push against the same magnetic forces in the train. The cars float along without touching the roadbed.

Goldblatt’s support for this newer technology has caused a little distress among backers who were ready to plunge into the new monorail battle. But Goldblatt says he hasn’t abandoned his cause; he’s just moved with the times. “This [maglev] is a monorail. It’s a single-track operation, just more sophisticated. I don’t see any discrepancy in ! my thinking. I’m flexible enough that when I see something come along that’s a greater potential, I want it,” Goldblatt says.

The maglev monorail Goldblatt cites isan experimental system offered by HSSTNevada Corp., which is attempting to interest Las Vegas and the surrounding county in a maglev project. But maglev suffersfrom the same criticism that monorail hasfaced and still faces: is the technology sufficiently developed for a city to invest in it?Dallas does not want to be a billion-dollar :guinea pig for some company trying to per- ifeet its design.

The whole question of technology, of. maglev versus monorail versus light rail, may very well be a moot question. The powers that be could decide that carpools, bus lanes or special busways, toll roads, or other non-rail projects are better ways of spending the money. USC urban and re- i gional planning professor Peter Gordon says monorail, light rail, and other high-volume ’ transit technologies are not going to work in cities like Dallas, regardless of their cosmopolitan, futuristic allure.

“What you’ve got to do is attract people away from private auto use,” Gordon said. “They just don’t do that, and they’re not going to do that. There are so few episodes where people leave their private autos behind and get on the rail instead, and certainly never enough to justify the huge expenditure. It just doesn’t pan out.”

DART board member Buerger hopes differently. He says people have told him they would ride a monorail. “They say It’d be fun. I wouldn’t ride a train and I wouldn’t ride a bus, but I’d ride a monorail.’ I think people visualize themselves riding monorail, a lot of people who wouldn’t visualize themselves on the Hooterville trolley.”