BIKE: Las Vegas monorail shut down

[Patrick Goetz]

Nawdry wrote:
> 
> Well, maybe deliverance will be at hand.  I'm sure it will, eventually 
> (perhaps before Bombardier's monorail division goes totally bankrupt).  
> But, again, I cannot think of any standard-rail system  - light, heavy, 
> or in-between - which has ever been totally shut down FOR DAYS because 
> of a problem with a single vehicle.
>

Perhaps Bombardier, which is primarily concerned with selling its TRAXX 
light rail and locomotive vehicles should get out of the monorail 
business; they don't seem to be very good at it and a chronic problem in 
public transportation is consultants and manufacturers who steer transit 
agencies away from solutions which are the most cost effective for the 
public and towards solutions which make them the most money.  With 
exploding sales in Asia, Hitachi is now fully committed to monorail 
technology, but more often than not, manufacturers asked to recommend 
transit solutions will steer transit agencies towards light rail, which 
is more profitable both because it is more expensive and because they've 
been doing it longer, hence have all the bugs worked out. 
Business-savvy Asians have begun nipping this nonsense in the bud, but 
in the US we're still allowing Bill Liebermann's to flush our 
hard-earned cash down the toilet while they lustily stuff their own 
pockets to bursting in the process.  Then the Wendell Cox's and Gerald 
Daugherty's dutifully pop up to declare all of rail transit a 
boondoggle. Everyone (consultants like Liebermann, light rail 
manufacturers, and critics like Cox) make money while the public gets 
fleeced.

The Las Vegas monorail has 2 hard ninety-degree turns separated by a 
relatively short distance, which is quite unusual for any rail system, 
and apparently Bombardier hadn't sufficiently anticipated the stress 
this would put on the guide wheels, despite the fact that Bombardier did 
build a special test track featuring sharp turns similar to those found 
in the Vegas system.  I might add that the Bombardier bogey (the part 
with the wheels) is new, untested in practice, and proprietary (i.e. 
patented).  The bogey design used by MTrans is based on the original 
Alweg design in operation since the 1960's, is open source, so anyone 
can copy it, and enjoys a perfect safety record after 1 year of operation.


 > Curiously, there are also a small handful
> of urban-transit monorail schemes under way - primarily in Third World 
> cities like Jakarta, Teheran, and Almaty, which already have fairly well 
> developed standard-rail networks anyway.
>

This is only curious if you don't think about it.  Since monorails are 
successful in Asia, other Asians see them in operation and opt to 
implement this technology themselves.  The fact that most of these 
places already have light and heavy rail is an even stronger indication 
that monorail is superior, since there is usually a stong bias to simply 
expand an existing system unless something radically better comes along. 
   The initial prejudice against monorail in Kuala Lumpur, for example, 
was no different than elsewhere:  MTrans was not allowed to establish a 
direct connection to the primary rail station, KL Sentral, and instead 
had to make do with a covered walkway connecting the 2 stations: 
http://www.monorails.org/tMspages/KLspecial02.html

Given our current state of affairs, I'd be embarrassed to call anyone 
else a 3rd world country, but Lyndon fails to mention Ho Chi Minh City, 
which is currently in negotations with Hitachi, and Chongqing, China, 
who's Hitachi-based system appears to be coming on-line a full year 
ahead of schedule:
   http://skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=131473

Not to mention existing systems in Japan, Malaysia, and China.  A recent 
business book implies that the true wealth of nations is in the average 
IQ of the populace, and all 3 of Japan, China, and Korea enjoy a higher 
average IQ than the US.  (And many Malaysians and Indonesians are ethnic 
Chinese.)  Could a higher IQ be why Asians are now consistently 
selecting monorail as the public transit system of choice?  Is the 
continued strong sales of Hummers all the proof necesary that we can't 
be allowed out of the house without a child leash and adult supervision?

> Patrick continues to facilely 
> confuse the entire issue of a FULLY GRADE-SEPARATED RAPID TRANSIT MODE 
> with the issue of the GUIDANCE TECHNOLOGY (rails, beams, or whatever) 
> with the issue of enhanced performance of a predominantly SURFACE MODE 
> such as LRT (or the various permutations of bus operations grouped under 
> the rubric "BRT").
> 

No, I'm just trying not to rehash points which have been made over and 
over.  Lyndon knows as well as I do that monorail is the least expensive 
grade-separated technology, which is the primary reason I'm an advocate: 
  elevated light rail, upper deck roadways for BRT, and subway are all 
considerably more expensive than monorail.  The way one arrives at 
monorail as the best solution is by realizing that grade-separated leads 
to the best results, followed by identifying the simplest and cheapest 
way to implement a grade-separated high-capacity vehicle.  This is why 
monorail was invented in the first place.