Static Zombie

There is a chance of this having been fightin' talk. :-)

Please could you be a little clearer about your rebuttal? I am not sure whether it is one of the following scenarios or some other that I have not yet considered:

1a) You object to tax dollars on public transport,

1b) You object to tax dollars on monorail as opposed to other forms of public transport,

1c) You object to tax dollars on monorail with this particular alignment as opposed to possible other routes for a hypothetical monorail,

2) You object to the objections that people have made against monorail and the fact that there isn't a considerably wider public transport infrastructure already,

3) You don't actually have particularly strong feelings about the monorail one way or the other, but you really liked that episode of The Simpsons.

Dug: What about us lazy slobs?
Peter: You will all get cushy jobs!

Monorail! Monorail!

Chris: That'd be 1b. In Seattle, the primary source of traffic congestion is commuting across Lake Washington. Currently you have three choices: the 520 floating bridge, which at 2 lanes in each direction is too small for its traffic volume; the I-90 bridge which is wider but not as centrally located as 520; or going around the lake entirely, which is only convenient if you happen to be at its northern or southern edge.

The planned monorail runs north-south on the western edge of Seattle, offering no commuting relief for the hordes of lake-crossers.

Plus, it's a freakin' monorail. Let's just hand out personal jetpacks and be done with it.

The Monorail is for the City of Seattle. If you're commuting across the lake, you either live or work outside the city. Either find a job in the city, or move.

I also disagree about the lake bridges being the main problem. There is also a major problem through downtown going both ways, as there are only two thru lanes of traffic that go through the city center.

The Green line, the first planned route of the monorail is in the area where it is needed most. The north/south route from West Seattle to Ballard. The areas that will most suffer when the Alaskan Way Viaduct collapses.

There's quite a nice map at http://www.soundtransit.org/maps/linkroute.htm which shows the two roads you mention.

Would you rather have had more-than-14 miles of Link light rail than 14 miles of monorail? I'm idly wondering what sort of rail bridge across the lake you could get for about a billion dollars. (Or, perhaps, for that sort of money, a tunnel underneath it.) Let me see... Sounder commuter rail doesn't have a handy rail bridge across itself, does it?

One rail iron horse makem nice toy for rich man.

Ugh.

Many happy folk ride to cushy job while runs-with-no-pudding-can must take stinky bus.

I don't think the primary purpose of transit is to get people out of the way of those who want to Drive Everywhere. The primary purpose of transit is to create an alternative to Driving Everywhere. The primary measure of its success is the extent to which it's useful to the people who use it, not the extent to which it creates value for the people who don't. The monorail is more likely to add additional trips downtown, than it is to convert existing car trips into monorail trips. It creates value not by relieving congestion, but by making it possible for more people to access the city, creating network effects from increased density. It also gives people more choices rather than forcing them to be so dependent on cars.

From what I can see, the Seattle Monorail Project is a well-thought-out plan. It's certainly head-and-shoulders above the light rail that runs near my house in Silicon Valley. The primary problem with transit is that people won't use it if it's much slower than driving. The light rail is a failure mostly because it is so slow. It weaves and bends along city streets, and competes with traffic, and so it takes forever to get from A to B. The wait between trains is also long. The monorail is a much better concept because it's physically separated from traffic, doesn't require drivers, so it can offer much more frequent service with smaller trains, and has higher top speeds. I think the technology is well-matched to the proposed use.

For crossing the lake, the easy/effective way to do that with transit would be to add express buses, and give them priority access to the bridge. This would be as fast as any rail-based solution, and more flexible and easy to deploy. (The highest-density transit system in the world is the bus lane of the Lincoln Tunnel into NYC.) It can easily serve many corridors instead of a single one. The problem is not funding, I don't think. It's just hard to get people out of their cars and into buses. They are used to going exactly where they want to go, having their car so they can go out to lunch or go shopping on the way home, etc.

Building transit where people will use it (downtown) makes more sense than building it where they won't (suburban commuting), even if there are more trips of the latter type than the former.

I do think that funding transit in general, and the monorail in particular, with a surtax on vehicle registration, is a bad idea. A gas tax would be better (God knows, we need much higher gas taxes), but there should also be more direct contribution from the people who directly benefit from the monorail (e.g., downtown property owners). In practice, though, money is money, and it doesn't really matter whether tax A theoretically funds government activity X, and tax B funds activity Y, or vice versa.