BIKE: Las Vegas monorail shut down

[Patrick Goetz]

Nawdry wrote:
> 
> I believe this incident thoroughly corroborates many of the weaknesses 
> of automated monorail technology which I have been pointing out for some 
> time.  See relevant articles below...
> 

Of course the new Houston Light Rail system has had over 60 real 
accidents since it began operating in January 2004, averaging 1 accident 
every 4.3 days (http://actionamerica.org/houston/) which thoroughly 
corroborates many of the weaknesses of in-the-street light rail 
technology that I've been pointing out for some time.

The Las Vegas Monorail is new technology, employing completely automated 
newly-designed high-capacity vehicles and has been in operation for less 
than 2 months.  Lyndon's reporting of the facts is, as usual, at best, 
extremely selective, similar to what one finds on the Fox News Now, 
er... I meant LightRailNow website.  The cause of the dislodged wheel 
has already been identified, and the system could have been back in 
operation almost immediately.

It's unfortunate that the whole system has been shut down for days 
because of one incident; however, since this is a new system, the 
operators want to be 100% certain that it is completely safe and that 
they continue to enjoy a 100% accident-free record.  To this end, 
they're conducting yet another comprehensive safety investigation which 
will go on until they're satisfied that this will not happen again.

Contrast this with light rail, which is the most dangerous form of mass 
transit in America, with the highest number of fatalities per passenger 
mile of any form of mass transit technology (see the video "Light Rail: 
Smoke and Mirrors" for more information).  In the 50 years in which 
straddle-beam monorail systems have been in operation, there hasn't been 
a single fatality.  Contrast this with at least a dozen deaths caused by 
light rail each year in the US alone.  (Talking about incidents per 
passenger mile is meaningless in this case, since 0 vs. dozens means the 
difference is infinite no matter what the passenger mile numbers are, so 
long as there is at least 1 mile of monorail in operation.)  Meanwhile, 
maybe the Las Vegas folks should have put their system out to bid rather 
than just trusting that Bombardier would be good enough.  This company, 
which mostly builds light rail trains, seems like a bad choice to me.

It's incomprehensible to me that a Light Rail advocate would be 
trumpeting a simple mechanical failure in a 6-week old system as 
"proving" that the technology is unsound, when this same person is a 
leading spokesperson for a technology which is slow, expensive, and 
extremely dangerous compared to all other forms of mass transit.  But 
this is par for the course.  Light Rail consultants (most recently in 
Phoenix Arizona) get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by local 
transit agencies to come up with such brilliant observations as this, 
recently printed up in a glossy brochure touting the benefits of light 
rail in Phoenix Arizona:  "Monorail switchover time is unacceptably 
slow, leading to limited minimum headways".  Apparently the 90 *second* 
switchover time (Las Vegas Monorail) is unacceptably slow while the 6-15 
*minute* switchovers of Light Rail systems are A-OK.  This isn't 
stupidity, it's dangerous, asinine stupidity which is preventing us from 
having a real mass transit system.  Or perhaps it's just "experts" 
getting paid large sums of money to regurgitate what they already know 
rather than making the effort to educate themselves about the modern 
possibilities.  Free cash vs. actually working a bit for the public's 
hard-earned coin.

People whom I've shown the video "Light Rail: Smoke and Mirrors" to or 
who have seen the AMP monorail presentation always only have one 
question:  why on earth would ANYONE advocate a light rail system over 
monorail?  No one could be this stupid.  Frankly, I don't know the 
answer to this question, but I suspect that it must be corruption.  Not 
corruption on the scale of Haliburton, since light rail is such small 
potatoes compared to the highway lobby, for example, but not as small as 
a simple pinochle scam in the Boston Common, either.  It's somewhere in 
between, with shysters like Bill Liebermann picking up a cool $190 grand 
to show up in town trumpeting light rail for a couple of days, or Lyndon 
being payed more than 20 thousand dollars by Capital Metro to look on 
the lvmonorail.com web page to determine that the cost of this system 
including private debt service comes out to 160M/mi.  I mentioned the 
Bill Liebermann scam before a couple of years ago.  Apparently someone 
forwarded my message to Liebermann, and he wrote me an indignant 
response which included the following comment, NOT taken out of context:

Lieberman, William <William.Lieberman> writes:
"You went on to state that "Capital Metro paid this loser $190,000 to 
come to town for a few luncheons."  I should point out that my total 
contract budget is actually $196,000, which includes payments to a sub 
consultant and reimbursement of travel expenses.  Moreover, as with most 
consultant contracts, I'm paid only for hours actually worked, not the 
entire amount up front, as implied in your statement.  I can also assure 
you that my work here has consisted of many hours of research, in 
addition to an occasional luncheon."

This is an example of what is called "chutzpah".  For anyone who had a 
chance to see the 2002 Rapid Transit Project "matrix", the sole fruit of 
this "research", you can judge for yourself the quality of Liebermann's 
work.  If you didn't, let me give a clue:  a junior high school science 
project would have contained more accurate information, and would have 
been more comprehensive as well.

Sad, sad.  Lyndon Henry, David Dobbs, and Roger Baker all think monorail 
is "stupid" and that light rail is the best and most appropriate mass 
transit technology.  This used to bother me (intellectually, since they 
seem like bright and engaged individuals) until I realized that these 
folks have been transportation activists in Austin since the 1960's, and 
in those 40 some-odd-years, every single proposal they've supported has 
failed, and every proposal they've opposed has passed.  A perfect record 
of failure, so to speak.  Today we have more highways, more sprawl, more 
congestion, more traffic fatalities, a higher per capita VMT, and a more 
completely inelastic dependence on foreign oil than anyone could 
possibly have imagined in the 1960's.  Oh, and we have no fixed guideway 
transit system, unless you count the Zilker Park Zephyr.  Have they 
finally decided to do something to create positive change by stringently 
opposing monorail, knowing that 40 years of abject and complete failure 
virtually guarantees that monorail will be a stunning success in Austin? 
Or are they simply garden variety doom-and-gloom apocalypsists?  Who 
knows, but as a non-armageddonist myself, I will continue to work 
towards a transportation and consequently land-use solution which will 
lead to a better and more sustainable Austin, regardless of whether or 
not a wheel fell of a Bombardier train in Las Vegas after 6 weeks of 
operation.  As an aside, I'm currently convinced that MTrans has the 
most sensible monorail technology, including an open source bogey design 
which can be copied by anyone, and the MTrans Kuala Lumpur safety record 
is perfect after over a year of continuous operation.  Meanwhile, MTrans 
continues to improve their technology while Houstonites refer to their 
light rail system as the "Wham-Bam-Tram".

Maybe we should talk about solutions instead of displaying a near 
perfect imitation of the Bush/Cheney campaign strategy of bizarre 
negative attacks based on a thimble of beans.  But hey, maybe we'd 
prefer to just continue to fail for another 40 years.  The choice is 
yours, but be advised that failure for another 40 years might not be 
nearly as consequence-free as the failures of the last 40 years.  From 
this perspective, you'll have to pardon my lack of patience for a 
perpetuation of the status quo (failed light rail advocacy and 
break-neck road construction).  If you're not part of the solution, 
please step aside, as you're most certainly part of the problem.