Orphan Road

On the river of time we sometimes paddle lustily, improving the speed with which we sweep forward, but more often- alas!- we're a woodchip, bobbing now in the eddy and then sucked into the stream.

In such a wise, Seattle, having defeated mass transit in 1970, fell into a deep slumber, and now awakens, like Cinderella, or perhaps, like Rip Van Winkle, shaking aside cobwebbed dreams of Roger Rabbit and the 1956 Alweg monorail at Disneyland.

We have a new trolley, an old trolley struggling to be reborn, a light-rail system nearing an opening, and the chance to tear down the freeway the fifties laid across the Seattle waterfront. We can confidently predict fuel prices of $5 per gallon by the time Sound Transit cuts the ribbons.

In Denver and Salt Lake City, after seeing light-rail (LRT) in action, the voters approved additions of a hundred miles of system in each city. It is tempting to let time simply sweep us forward, borrowing from Denver a plan, and from Bonn (Germany) some modern technology.

This might suit the Seattle of today, but any long-time resident who saw Tex Johnson barrel-roll a 707 over a Gold Cup race totally owned by Slo-Mo-Shun IV wants more- we want to be Leaders!

And, given the state of transit in America today, that is not an impossibility. It's time to re-think transit, not in terms of what was, but in terms of what can be. After all, it's probably coming soon, to a neighborhood near you.

...to Disneyland:

The ride started in 1959 as part of Disneyland's first expansion and the current cars have carted visitors around the Disney area since 1987. For three years, Disney Imagineers have been working on the upgrades that will roll out through the summer.
"I think we're always looking for ways to update and refresh classic attractions," said Scot Drake, the monorail lead designer. "This is definitely an iconic attraction."
The biggest change is the look of the train: The first electric cars have blue glass and red stripes that change color in the sunlight. The next two cars will be blue with purple glass and orange with blue glass.

As we mourn the failed Monorail project on what would have been it's opening weekend, photographer Eliza Truitt has a beautiful collection of black-and-white photos of the proposed Green Line stations, all 19 of 'em. Check it out.

(Via Seattlest)

It's a day of nostalgia, apparently.

David Brewster interviews Seattle civic legend Jim Ellis, who worked on the 1968 "Forward Thrust" bond package:

The Forward Thrust package in 1968 would have given the area a system of amazing scope. It would have been completed in 1985 and fully paid off in 2008. It would have been heavy rail, largely in subways, with two prongs north, two prongs south, and two prongs on the Eastside. Unlike Portland's system, which is largely on the street, this system would have been separated from traffic and much faster. It probably would have done a fair amount toward shaping dense neighborhoods and concentrating urban growth. All this at one quarter the local cost of a completed (much smaller and slower) Sound Transit system.

Elsewhere, Seattle Metblogs reminds us that the Green Line -- the first line of the monorail system, was set to open December 15, 2007, otherwise known as this Saturday

IIRC, the Monorail folks eventually punted on that start date, saying that htey'd have a starter line open by then, but that it would take a couple more years to get all the way to West Seattle and Ballard.

But that's all water under the (crumbling) bridge.

Folke Nyberg wants to repair the viaduct. The consensus opinion is that you can't repair it. And even if you could, Nyberg's suggestions strike me as... odd. For example, I'm not sure how you "accommodat[e] emergency parking on each side of existing roadways" without tearing the thing down to widen it.

But hey, in the end, he throws a bone to monorail enthusiasts:

7. Considering an extension of the monorail line from the Seattle Center to the sports stadiums alongside the viaduct, with a possible extension to West Seattle and Ballard;

So hey, how bad can he be?

Faced with a budget shortfall, the Rocky Mountain News reports that Denver is considering a public-private partnership for part of its light-rail. The article notes several other transit projects that have been built with a PPP model called DBOM, for Design, Build, Operate and Maintain.

If that acronym rings a bell, it's because the same system was used for the Seattle Monorail Project. The plan was for the board to raise the money and sign the contract, then hand the whole thing off to the Fluor Corporation (or, more accurately, a consortium of companies led by Fluor). Additionally, you have the price guarantee: once the SMP signed off on the contract, Fluor would have had to build it, come hell or high water. There would be no sudden tax increases down the road because the project had run over budget, they'd just have to eat the difference.

And that's what makes PPPs attractive: you can hand off the whole thing to a company that presumably has more expertise in the area than you do. Halliburton providing food and laundry services to U.S. soldiers in Iraq is probably the most famous (infamous?) example of a PPP. But there are many others.

I've been skeptical of PPPs, because any efficiency you might gain in terms of expertise is usually eaten up by the higher cost of providing the service. And sometimes it's just a stalking horse to try and break the public-sector unions by firing government employees and re-hiring them as contractors.

But the monorail didn't fail because it was a PPP. The monorail failed because the board of directors was in way over its head and didn't want to build the political support necessary for a large infrastructure project. As interim Chair Kristina Hill noted at the time, "You can't build infrastructure by initiative. There is no infrastructure in the United States that has been built by petition—none!—and you have to ask yourself why."

The RMN article suggests that Seattle's forthcoming BRT system -- RapidRide -- may be run via DBOM, and that would make sense: King County Metro is an experienced transit operator, so subcontracting out this one piece is a good use of the PPP strategy.

When I saw the headline for Knute Berger's piece in Crosscut on the Las Vegas Monorail and what it tells us about our own fated elevated system, I was afraid he'd uncovered some serious reliability or other substantive issues with the Vegas line that would serve as a cautionary tale for would-be monorail resurrectionists like myself.

Fortunately, the article contains no such warnings. Instead, Berger focuses on the low ridership of the Vegas line and its out-of-the way location. Neither of those would have been an issue with the Seattle line, which would have been a commuter transportation system along a well-trafficked corridor, not a tourist-trap overpriced joyride like the Las Vegas line. Plus, Seattle's pedestrian friendly, unlike the Strip, where sidewalks disappear into casinos with little or no warning or simply stop.

Berger does support the idea of extending the line all the way to the airport, which I heartily agree with. Waiting for a cab at McCarran Airport is a daunting task. The circuitous four-mile ride from the airport via taxi reeks of a powerful taxi driver lobby. As a bonus, having a monorail connection directly from the Airport to the Strip would make Vegas seem even more like a Lunar resort colony than it already does.

Seeing that poster the other day got me thinking about the aborted Seattle Monorail Project again. I know most people would rather forget it (opening day was supposed to be December 2007, just seven months from now), but there were some valuable lessons there, and certainly the alignment, Ballard - Downtown - West Seattle is going to need to be served by high-capacity transit sooner rather than later. Especially if the Viaduct goes away.

Transit Now will help in the short term, but even the snazziest buses will get caught in traffic on the West Seattle Bridge or stuck waiting for the drawbridge in Ballard. After the Monorail died, the idea was broached to put in a light rail spur connecting SODO and West Seattle. Assuming you could deal with the technical challenges of crossing the Duwamish River, that certainly seems feasible.

But on the North end, the idea of a monorail between downtown and Ballard is still appealing, for a number of reasons. First off, building another downtown tunnel through Belltown seems unfeasible, especially since it would have to somehow cross through the Battery Street Tunnel. Second, we've already got a monorail running down 5th Avenue, and people are at least used to it (and used to the monorail making its way through Seattle Center). Finally, a monorail bridge over the Ballard ship canal is more cost-effective than a tunnel.

My only real objection to the monorail is the cost of maintaining a separate transit system (two separate maintenance facilities, engineers, etc.). But if we're going to maintain the Seattle Center monorail anyway ($4.5M for the latest round of repairs alone), we might as well make it go somewhere.

I'm fairly sure there's zero political or public will for reviving this concept while the body of the last monorail project is still warm. Still, there's something there worth saving.