ALEX MARSHALL: Traveling —- driving down an open road, rolling on steel rails, soaring in the sky —- is romantic. Constructing the means to travel —-building a highway, a train line or an airport —- generally isn’t.
Which is why the new Seattle monorail project, set to begin construction this fall, is so interesting. It is a rare thing: a populist piece of infrastructure. Over the heads of the planners, the politicians and the business leaders, Seattle residents have come up with a plan, designed a system and then funded it — in three separate referendums. It’s an amazing act of civic chutzpah. The project’s eventual success or failure bears watching, because it raises the question of whether citizens can play the game of infrastructure development more directly, and not just give thumbs up or down to what the experts come up with.
The monorail has long been part of Seattle’s image of itself, which helps explain public support for the project. A tiny, toy monorail, less than a mile long, was part of the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962. It was left in place afterward because residents and tourists liked it so much. The image of the futuristic car atop white concrete pylons became part of the city’s image, as much as its towering Space Needle.
Flash forward 35 or so years. The region’s mobility is terrible, in large part because people must get around only on a few big highways that crisscross the water-bound region. In its geographic form, Seattle resembles Manhattan and its boroughs; it is almost an island surrounded by populous suburbs. Except unlike New York City, Seattle lacks a mass transit system to get people across or under the water in large numbers; all traffic must cross the water by car over bridges. In response to the congestion, experts had proposed and the City Council had approved, a regional light rail system. Like most light rail systems, it was expensive, slow to be designed and constructed, and soon became mired in a number of neighborhood controversies about route and design. Some people started to question it.
Here’s where things got interesting. A taxi driver said, “Why not a monorail?” It travels above traffic, he reasoned, and so would neither rob drivers of traffic lanes, nor pose the threat of collisions. Moreover, it would be “a Seattle solution” to urban congestion, rather than one bought off the shelf of national planning models.
He and a hastily organized civic group, ignoring the dismissals of various experts, then collected the thousands of signatures necessary to put the project, in concept, on a popular referendum. Voters approved it in 1997. Then voters approved a specific route and a special car tax to pay for it, in two more referendums in 1999 and 2002.
Amazing. Now construction is set to begin this fall, even though anti-monorail groups, some supported by downtown business groups, are trying to stop it through counter-referendums.
Here’s the basic plan. The first 14-mile “green” line would run from the northern suburbs through the downtown core and into West Seattle. It would run 20 to 40 feet above the street and complement the city’s light rail system, which is still being built but has been modified. A half dozen other monorail lines are planned for the future, all with varying colors.
Will it work? I don’t know, but on a recent visit to the monorail offices in downtown Seattle, I was impressed with the energy and creativity the people there seemed to exude. Kristina Hill, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Washington who is involved with the project, talked about how they were designing small-footprint stations with banks of elevators to quickly carry people up and down. Jonathan Buchter, the director of finance, talked of how the absence of federal funding had freed the agency to be nimble and pursue imaginative ways of raising operating income. One idea being pursued is offering tourists a more expensive ride on separate trains that would offer guided tours of the city. In general, staffers said transportation experts have an irrational bias against monorails, which are more flexible and practical than in decades past.
Bombardier of Canada and Hitachi from Japan, apparently the only two monorail makers in the world, are competing to construct the system. The $1.6 billion contract will be of the increasingly popular “DBOM” type, which means one firm designs, builds, operates and maintains the structure. The politicians and public like this because it seems to ensure accountability. I worry about firms designing proprietary systems that could turn out to be lucrative monopolies for themselves.
Unless the lawsuits and referendums derail the project, the world will have a chance to judge just how practical monorails are. I wish them luck, although a certain perspective must be maintained. For all the fireworks it is still just one line, whose capacity, like light rail lines, will be surprisingly low by New York standards. The monorail at first will have a top capacity of 3,000 passengers per hour, compared to 30,000 for an average subway line. The capacity can be expanded to 6,000. To truly give Seattlites more options, the city and region need to keep building transit at a steady, prodigious rate for decades to come. It will be interesting to see whether Seattle residents maintain their romance with the monorail, as time goes by.
– Alex Marshall, www.alexmarshall.org