Recluse reflections

Recluse reflections: Those were the days: An old monorail proposal
Notes on spaces seen through windows

"But now he knows these hills, that is to say he knows them better, and if ever again he sees them from afar it will be I think with other eyes, and not only that but the within, all that inner space one never sees, the brain and heart and other caverns where thought and feeling dance their sabbath, all this too quite differently disposed."
-- Samuel Beckett

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Robin Evans
Seattle

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Saturday, October 08, 2005

Those were the days: An old monorail proposal

I just ran across an intriguing bit of history. This is an early proposal for an alternative to the Sound Transit light-rail system that is now under construction. These folks wanted to use ST money to build a monorail along the I-5 corridor instead of the "snake-like" rail route that was finally settled on.

This proposal is, of course, very different than the snake-like monorail route built above neighborhoods and business districts that was eventually adopted by the Seattle Monorail Project. It's interesting to look back at these old arguments. They help us understand how we got to where we are today with an massively expensive library of studies and legal documents, but not a single mile of new monorail guideway anywhere in the city.

This document shows optimistic projections for the effect of a monorail system, compared to more realistic projections for similar light-rail features. It mentions, for instance, guideway columns that would be "as small as 2 - 3 feet in diameter, spaced 100-150 feet apart." It sounded good, but was a poor prediction since SMP eventually came up with a plan that would have planted piers for the guideway that would have been twice that size. (See this .pdf summary of SMP's contract with Cascadia that says "the most common column size is likely to be about 4.25 ft by 5 ft".)

But all of that optimism about a monorail still seems to infect some discussions about the SMP's failed plans. It all sounded kind of cool and Jetsons-like when these folks were talking about monorails years ago. Somehow the project has managed to maintain some of that mid-century romantic luster despite the bureaucratic disaster surrounding its actual implementation.

posted by WebWrangler | 12:49 PM | Link | 0 comments

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