BIKE: Re: Rail Issues (2)

[Nawdry]

At 10/28/2004 23:02 , Michael Bluejay <bikes> wrote:


>On Oct 28, 2004, at 10:56 PM, Nawdry wrote:
>
> > No, the Vegas monorail should not be fatally judged by this one
> > experience so soon after its launch.  But, as I said, this experience
> > does seem to point to drawbacks of the technology...
>
>There you go again, and this is exactly what I'm talking about.  A
>brand-new system has some startup problems and that's enough for you to
>indict whole technology.  Amazing.
>
>You can add as much verbage to your posts as you want but your real
>feelings are laid bare with comments such as the one above.  And that's
>why I'm now tuning you out.
>
>-MBJ-
>
>P.S.  Of *course* I cherry-pick your comments.  It's necessary to
>filter out all the excess babble and spin to get to the heart of your
>real position.  The gazillion paragraphs of your last post are fluff;
>the substance is your excerpted quote above.


Well, here I go again.  I had always suspected Michael to be sort of 
cognitively deaf, but to make a virtue out of it is rather 
astounding.  This pathetic revelation does help explain why he keeps 
inventing positions for me and fabricating quotations and viewpoints I have 
never made or held.  (One might think that, if ever there were an 
appropriate candidate target for one of Patrick Goetz's extended passionate 
orations on open-mindedness, it would be Michael this time, instead of me, 
but somehow I don't expect that in this case.)

Yes, a transit technology can have drawbacks, and all technologies do.  Why 
this fairly obvious fact seems to shake Michael to his core is a bit 
mystifying, but thank goodness he has "tuned" me "out" - maybe I will get 
some relief from his persistent re-engineering of my comments.

The shutdown of the Las Vegas monorail does seem to point to some critical 
drawbacks of the technology, or to some extent, at least, the current 
design of monorail projects.  For example, manually operated systems appear 
to have a far greater propensity for continuing operation despite 
relatively small glitches, and even some fairly large ones.  In contrast, 
the LV monorail's totally automatic operation seems to depend integrally on 
the unflagging functional integrity of all components of the system, so 
that fairly minor mishaps (like a stuck door) basically shut down 
everything.  (I have seen LRT operators leave their cabs, go and unstick a 
door, and return to running their car or train.  Signal failures also 
happen, but are "worked through" by line-of-sight operating practices.)

Another potential problem I suspect is the high number of wheels/tires - 
more moving parts implies more bearings and other hardware to wear out, 
increasing ongoing maintenance needs and perhaps leading to some of the 
problems which have beset the LV monorail.  Each 4-unit M-VI trainset has 8 
load tires and 32 guidance tires.  In contrast, a typical 
single-articulated light rail vehicle (LRV) has 12 wheels; a 2-car train 
(roughly equivalent to the capacity of a 4-unit M-VI trainset) would have 
24.  Rail rapid transit cars, typically rigid-body, have 8 wheels per car, 
or 16 per 2 cars.  To what extent the high number of monorail wheels (and 
the extra complexity of guidewheel steering mechanisms, etc.) might 
actually increase the likelihood of wheel or tire-related malfunctions is a 
matter for research, but it seems worth investigating.

I also wonder whether, in the case of the LVMC project, there was a kind of 
precipitous haste on the part of Bombardier to leap into this project with 
a proprietary transit technology that was less than fully developed.  That, 
of course, is not an indictment of monorail technology as a whole (Hitachi 
seems to have a pretty solid and mature product), but perhaps it does help 
explain why most transport planners are reluctant to jump into bed with 
new, little-tested, relatively unproven "gadget" systems with weak (or 
nonexistent) track records, and instead tend to opt for solid, well-proven 
technologies like standard rail, with lots and lots of vendors offering 
lots and lots of hardware and rolling stock options, all of it off the 
shelf, reasonable in cost, and thoroughly inter-compatible.  As I have 
previously noted, there are the "horror stories" of systems stuck with 
"orphan" proprietary technologies and facing unpleasant difficulties and 
expense in terms of upgrading their hardware, getting new rolling stock, etc.

Finally, there's the danger introduced by trainsets (with dozens of wheels) 
straddling a single beam, which opens the possibility of debris or 
drippings falling down on the street below.  I've warned about this 
possibility for the last couple of years, and this seems to be exactly what 
has triggered the current crisis and shutdown. Trying to solve it and 
prevent its recurrence is probably what's mainly preoccupying LV officials, 
and prompting them to be extremely cautious in their investigation and 
reluctant to rush to re-open the system.  My proposed remedy, of course, is 
to require and incorporate a drip pan beneath the beamway in all elevated 
monorail alignments (which is just about all of them).

Anyway, those are some of the possible drawbacks in the LV system which, I 
perceive, may be issues in the current situation.

LH