How Los Angeles Rejected the Monorail 

I agree. If there was ever a chance for this idea to work, it would've been at this exact moment in time... and there was still too much working against it.

Look at the cost and long-lead of back-developing the light rail system. Still no direct connection from Union Staion to LA International (They're both LAX, so that designation is ambuguous in the context).

​@@inyobillComing next year. What will you naysayers have to whine about when that's finished?

@@themoviedealers you misunderstand what i'm saying. HSR California is a good idea, i only mentioned th draconian pro cess of connecting to air travel.

I've always thought: it'd be quite the experience to take the train (either Amtrak or, one day, HSR) to Anaheim ARTIC station, then hop on Disney's monorail to Disneyland. From what I've seen from Disney, especially with them "letting themselves go" in Florida, I doubt this ever has been possible at all :/

It is incredible to see how LA is trying to fix its transportation problem for almost a CENTURY now, and it all always just end with corruption. I strongly believe that some people in those "public" companies should have end up behind bars. How ridiculous it is, that the city make a special board, the board operates for 20 years and they have literally NO RESULTS at all, all they do is consume tax payers money. And it is literally ALL they do, with 20 years in charge they bring completely nothing as if it never existed. Incredible and no one ended up behind bars for this "successful" mission

Kevin Fields As a kid I was at the German Test track, back then i knew about the oil parties in the US. And why it failed in the US. Cities need to provide mass transportation systems, private parties can operate them. LA is big enough to develop a system themselves!

The Simpsons did a pretty good episode on them 😂

If Disney had moved forward, there were plenty of right-wing psychopaths at the oil and rubber companies to stop it one way or another. Disney wasn't one to rock any boats outside of his own fiefdoms, and mass transportation was NOT his alloted slot.

Bay Area Rapid Transit. Built back in the 70s. Rode it many times.

I’ve seen people complain about it and I’m like… have you been to LA

AY CARAMBA¡!

I remember when it was first built. Sadly BART is long in the tooth today and needs a major overhaul. I rode it a a daily commuter not long ago and it frequently broke down or slowed to a craw at peak hours. As well it needs to be extended south to San Jose and east to either the 5 or the 99.

@@mauisam1 it has been extended to San Jose in the last decade. And they're getting all new trains. Another major issue is the limited tracks available so they have to do maintenance when the service is shut down instead of just closing specific tracks 1 at a time and keeping service running. This means maintenance is harder and they don't have a 24 hour system.

They are not impractical ask chongqing and São Paulo

@@qjtvaddict Straddle-type monorails are incredibly hard to switch -- monorail switches are huge, slow devices. In addition, they work on rubber tires, meaning they're inefficient due to high friction (just like cars). Finally, nobody's managed to build a high-speed monorail (not counting maglev monorails).

We need scaled cost 3d printed track "mag lev" monorails, hyperloop is still a literal pipe dream at this point due to the energy requirements for vacuum and expanding and contracting of pipes. This is can be done now with current tech, lets do it.

Me too

@@qjtvaddict we still haven’t finessed the part 2 here🤣

You should display his work to the public

As someone moving to LA very soon, I hope they get their act together in the next few years. My hope is that, with so many 6/8 lane boulevards, it wouldn't actually be that difficult to block off the center two and put in some more semi separated LRT along major throughfares

Don't forget the rich history of streetcars LA has, not dissimilar to much of the early established cities in the rest of the country. Tracks paved over for cars.

And yes of course I commented before watching so that was already taken into account 🗿

@@mrmaniac3 the story of streetcars in the US is a bit sad. But building new LRT lines we need to make sure we aren’t just trying to emulate them, which were effectively electric buses, (modern buses do that job well enough) and instead seek to create something more rapid that can compete with cars for longer journeys

@@chrisorr8601 true, the worst aspect of a street running rail vehicle is that it gets stuck in traffic. It can still work if the street level right of way is dedicated to transit and utility usage, allowing buses and utility vehicles maybe, or by making it exclusively for the rail vehicle. But the better option is to grade separate, either the cheaper elevated or more expensive subterranean. Streetcars still have their place, just as monorail and maglev do, but are similarly not ideal in a majority of use cases.

Maybe not all objections would melt away considering how powerful the oil industry has control by bribing, or lobbying, politicians and others in decision-making roles.

As the old saying goes, follow the money. In this case who stood to loose the most money? The oil companies and Detroit.

But that's actually the nice thing: you can build a suspension monorail and have cars drive below it!

To be clear, as a Los Angeles native, the average person has never been opposed to rapid mass transit, regardless of cost or looks. From street cars, to light rail, to subways, elevated rail, or monorails, the average person just hasn't cared which is chosen, so long as one or more is chosen. It's always some skyscraper property owner who throws a few million at elected officials every few years to 'preserve the view' associated with their property so it doesn't lose value, like what was pointed out about the Wilshire business district... Or a wealthy group of people that much the same way, stop a project like South Pasadena did when Interstate 710 was supposed to be built from the LA/LB harbor straight to interstate 210 right through their part of town, linking the harbor to a direct route to out of the state alleviating much of the truck traffic on all of the surrounding interstates that they were and currently still use because the 710 does not connect to the 210, but making that connection would lower their property value and give the general riff raff direct access to their part of town so must stop that... Or like what else was pointed out in this video, the private bus owners with competing service stepping in and squashing it only for themselves to also go out of business because they stopped the very thing that would have alleviated the traffic allowing them to continue to operate at a profit... Or the general mismanagement of larger projects like the California High Speed Rail project. At no point, has the average person from Los Angeles or surrounding areas ever said, "Gross what's that thing that doesn't look like a car or an extra highway lane." Every single one of us simply does not care so long as it does the job of getting people from where they are to where they need to be.

@@Stant123 Except we do care. Monorails don't meet the requirements of Los Angeles Public Transit, especially in the Sepulveda Corridor. They're slow to adapt compared to the heavy rail/subways.

@@Stant123 YOU SHALL NOT PASS!!!! That interstate through my area.... riff raff scares me :(

@@mipmipmipmipmip yes because you want to be on the 3rd floor of anything and have a train go by. Are you 5? They got rid of most of the elevated railways in NYC for a reason.

It would require a total rethink of city design, where people lived in more dense environments connected by rail systems. And that doesn't fly (literally) in today's political environment.

Depends on the city, Toronto, Montreal, and especially Vancouver are completely walkable without a car. Even in the suburbs. Calgary, Edmonton, not quite. But they make up for it in other things

That's because major public transportation costs hundreds of millions to get going and only serve a small number of people (most people don't want to take a bus) and require yearly subsidies to stay operational. Usually a bus transit system is only required to bring in 10% of its operation costs while the other 90% is government funded. It's a money pit.

Its all about money and politics. North America needs new transit systems. The US and Canadian government knows this. Cities know this States know this Money prevents it Politics prevents it red tape prevents it uneducated population prevents it. You'll never have a new system unless you can prove. It can fix the issue Make money. Doesn't interfere in the automotive industry Doesn't affect sales in the automotive industry Doesn't take money from the automotive and oil industry. That your willing to take some cut backs by companies and similar that would take advantage in hiking prices and material Or just be insanely rich create your own community with a monerail system and show it can be done and have it expand to others.

I feel like having transit/bus only lanes, higher public transit consistency, and having every other street open for cars, would greatly improve public transit without having to build anything new. Lets make Cities more people centric less car centric

From time to time I have to remind people that "Roger Rabbit" is a work of FICTION. And the GM-Firestone-Standard Oil-et al. backed National City Lines had little to do with Pacific Electric. After 1911, PE was owned by Southern Pacific, and as the years went by SP started divesting "traction properties" (electric railway lines). By the late 1940s, PE was the only one left, and SP management could see no future in local railway passenger service, so they "spun off" the remaining Red Car lines and their bus operations to to Metro Coach, and, according to one report, even helped with the financing.

lmao

And they ended up with the most half-baked and hare-brained scheme of all: a half-built grid of freeways and expressways, which have already proven themselves in New York City under Robert Moses to choke themselves into gridlock with traffic!

@@edwardmiessner6502 if you build it they will clog it.

I often wonder if Elon Musk's grandfather was involved in the LA Monorail project

Thank you!

we could not support mexicans and do a monorail- trump 2024

If there is no other option, the sumplest explination is probobly the corect one. Well, lets se if the board membets got really rich of random stock options.

@@matsv201 MY FAMILY LIVEDB WELL for decades off that windfall- thanks la

Hmmm… Boomers haven’t changed… time for some shit to finally get done.

It hasn't changed and won't change anytime soon.

Sure, but imagine the exorbitant costs in maintenance, replacement and upkeep? The damage from the smog and acid rain? I love the idea of the monorail, but so many more advanced technologies and improvements have been developed for both light & heavy standard rail!

@@bkark0935 Monorails are not necessarily more expensive to maintain than a traditional rail system. Nearly all straddle beam Monorails use a concrete or steel beam (the track) that the train with rubber tires sits on. Maglev based monorails like the Transrapid in Shanghai uses a linear motor with electromagnetic propulsion. They might cost more for initial construction but theoretically maintenance costs are lower due to fewer moving parts. And since most Monorail systems are outdoors and elevated means you’re not spending money on tunneling or relocating utilities. I dare say they could have built an entire 100 mile Monorail system for the same cost of the initial Metro Red Line Subway with change to spare. Let’s just be thankful the voters of L.A. today are expanding the Metro Light Rail system and trying to correct the damage done when they ended its predecessors the Yellow Car trolleys and Pacific Electric Red Car services.

@@bkark0935 I’m pretty sure the people using it would’ve payed for that

Eye Opening

I've never felt so weirdly sad about the death of an idea that never really got to live.

Tbh not sure what exactly is ment by less engineering in monorail, because that is not exactly true. If you mean engineering of the track than it could be said that yes. For the most time, it's much less complex than in case of ligh rail since the monorail is elevated, meaning you don't have to account for things like pedestrian or driver safety measures ( mainly in terms of crossings ), but the vehicles themselves are far more complex from engineering point of view than light rail, since they require multiple mechanisms to keep the vehicle on the rail, not to mention that the switches for monorails are far more complex than in case of regular rails. As for pedestrian colisions, that's to be expected when a vehicle runs on the groundlevel, those are gonna happen sometimes, but it's not really something the monorail would be exceptional in, as the same sort of result as in case of monorail can be achieved by separating the rail track from the ground - meaning either placing it above ground ( elevated lines ) or below the ground ( metro - in most cases ). Also, the accelerating corrosion in rebars in the foundations of nearby buildings are problem with poor quality of construction rather than something common for light rail - that's really on Houston and the company that constructed the system, not the technology itself.

@@milokojjones Thanks for your response. My comment about far less engineering mostly has to do with buried utilities that must be relocated or bridged at great expense (often not included in the LRT cost because the utilities have to shoulder that bill). Elevated monorail affects VERY few utilities for its very small footprint. There are a variety of monorail designs, each with its own beam/track switching system. Nevertheless, existing switches have been working perfectly for decades. Tracks require a huge amount of maintenance due to damage done from weight, sun baking, wheel sliding, and must be ground down to stay flat. Steel wheels must also be periodically ground, max 4 times when they're then out of tolerance. Here too is where the noise becomes severe; monorail is a quiet woosh, such that Disney has it going through a hotel. Your points are well taken on accidents and the leaching electricity Houston is experiencing, EXCEPT that elevated monorail is grade separated, and will not be encountering cross traffic. Again, a single, sleek beam rather that massive understructure to support heavy (weight) light rail (capacity). (BTW, Salt Lake City had to tear up and rebuild a whole line because they "forgot" about the leaching electricity problem.) That small footprint also means that ground traffic is far less impacted during construction (which can be done at night). Any rail vehicle can derail. Chicago and New York have had "L" cars fall, so the front of the car is on the ground, and the rear is still on the L structure. Monorail and mag-lev are attached to the beam, and cannot derail. I hope you'll respond. I'm happy to discuss these matters since I'll be a traffic/transportation engineer in my next life 😊, and I'm studying now.

​@@HighHolyOne I agree that the monorail has a smaller footprint than elevated railway track, but while that's an advantage, it rarely makes such a big difference to justify building a monorail over just a regular rail. Don't know about utilities, but I would say they are more or less comparable - you still need all the electrical work and track stabilization work for both elevated rail and monorail and you still need to relocate most of the buildings or constructions under the track ( it also depends on the type of the track, some newer ones may be more ''undertrack structure friendly'' than the older types ), but monorail is likely to be better in this. ( Though I'm not a structural or transportation construction engineer, so take my words with a pinch of salt. ) Also as a sidenote - noone in their right mind is gonna build the track in the night, not only because it's much more costly to build since you have to pay extra to the workers ( as nightshifts tend to be paid better ) and having to provinde equipment to pretty much light the place up so you can see on your work, but you are also gonna have to deal with the people who live there and I can tell you one thing and that one thing is, that they are not gonna be happy if you do your constructing at night, since construction work is quite noisy and they want to sleep. They would murder you if you did, don't try it :D As to to switches, they indeed depend on the type of monorail ( and they work ), but the point was, that they are much more complicated than rail switches, which is the case especially for the sort of concrete track monorail design that is often used in the US or Japan. Problem with that is that they are much more prone to issues as well as having much higher maintenance cost ( and maintenance time ). Speaking of track and track maintenance, while it is true that railway track requires quite a bit of maintenance, so does monorail track - weather and just the regular use of the track still means maintenance, that applies to wheels as well - again depending on the type of monorail, you either have rubber wheels ( usually for the concrete track one - which is also why it tends to be more quiet ) or steel wheels, which are very similar to rubber wheels ( for example on the Wuppertal Monorail in Germany ). Now, if we are talking about rubber wheels, they wear rather quickly, faster than steel wheels in the very least and they also have some disadvantages over steel wheels - they have higher roling resistance, which makes them less efficient than steel wheels ( though better at climbing steeper track ). Though this all is not really the main problem with monorails, they can be build and work alright, the main problem is, that they are not very versatile. They require elevated tracks at all time and only monorail vehicles can run on the track. That is a problem, because in most cases, you don't need the whole line to be elevated, just some part - for example one going through a dense city center. Just from that point of view, it is better to build elevated railway track, as you can just run the line through the city without needing to have some sort of transfer station that would separate the line into two halfs or expanding the monorail line to somewhere where there is no need for it and it's cheaper to build regular railway tracks. This already limits the posible situations when monorail could be better than building a regular rail to a very small and specific set of circumstances. But it really gets even worse considering that no other vehicles but monorails can run on the monorail track ( which is logical ), it would not be such a problem if other types of transportation ran on the same type of track, but they don't, they run mostly on regular rails ( and that's how your already existing infrastructure will likely be set up ). Railway tracks for light rail or any rail transportation have the benefit of the vehicles being able to run on the same track. That means that if I need to say get metro ( as the underground train ) from one side of the city to another, I can do so using my light rail track because the metro vehicle can run on these tracks. Similarly, say there was a problem with the water supply system in some area - I can use ( in theory ) a regular railway tank vagon to deliver the water to the affected areas using my light rail track. Similarly, since this is another vehicle type, you would need to build all of the infrastructure for it from the ground up - such as depos and repair shops, as well as get the qualified workers to fix them. With railway vehicles, thanks to their similarities, I can send my tram repair's man to fix my metro, because the vehicles are very similar and they also use lot of the same parts, making them cheaper to maintain. In conclusion, building a monorail is possible, but for the most part impractical. They are not very flexible in use, require their own set of infrastructure and cost quite a lot, delivering similar or worse performance to elevated light rail. They have their limited use where building them makes sence - atleast some, like for consideration, but that use is very limited, which is also why they are not used widely today. Sorry for the wall of text :D

I think you will find that most cities had transport surveys by De Liew Cather, which was a subsidiary of General Motors --which had a bus division.Sydney had a very extensive tram system. Although, one positive in it's elimination was that the harbour side depot became the site of of the Sydney Opera House

Converting old times trolleys to trams ("light rail") is literally one of the ways to modernize trolley systems.

@@ausbrum Sydney has narrow crooked streets. As the city expanded its teams were going to become less and less useful.

I actually ended up researching much of that story in parallel with this project. It's gonna be on the backburner for a while, but I definitely want to come back around to it at some point.

Appreciate it! The channel following has nearly doubled in size this year, so I'm not complaining. :)

We have it. We now have the third largest urban rail system in North America.

@@themoviedealers But compared to MTA, LA metro still isn't as convenient as it should be and unfortunately the lower population density and sprawl makes this hard.

@@themoviedealers it’s amazing that it’s the third largest and yet half the Angelenos I talk to don’t even know it exists. Let alone have ridden it.

@@thejadedmessiah LA's too damn big and without good first mile/last mile connections, the rail system benefits those who live close to it. Until there is stronger transit-oriented development, ridership will not grow. And with the pandemic and many people working from home, there is less need to even commute anymore. There needs to be a much stronger focus on addressing the needs of people who are transit dependent (including workers who can't do their job from home) and don't have other options, not trying to compete with freeways.

@@themoviedealers Problem with Los Angeles needs multiple transit systems. Yes the Rail system is exactly what the city needs but it needs others to allow it to have alternate transportation as well. The Monorail system can still be a alternative especially now in a era where most people can't even afford a starting car.

This video doesn't discuss negatives of monorails. If you look at trains, heavy or light rail alone without monorails, having different equipment drives large long term costs. BART in SF was designed with non-standard rail and wheel design. This makes those trains louder and it means they have to do custom orders with manufacturers of train cars. Now look at other light rail systems. Numerous cities have almost identical trains ordered from Siemens and other major light rail manufacturers. In fact, sometimes due to the nature of government funding, a city will order X number of trains, but then will sell a couple of the trains from their build to another city in need of trains on a quicker time scale. Or a smaller city might buy older gens of another cities trains that is upgrading. The short version of all that is re-usability and interoperability. Monorails, while really cool, use tires. (At least the Disneyland style ones.) Overtime, the maintenance costs get far worst versus rail systems. They also have worse friction then trains on rails requiring more energy. There's a reason why trains have developed as they have over the last couple hundred years and are dominant today.

The I-5 question is an easy one. When they were building the 5 there was a massive outcry from Central Valley residents. 6.5 million people live there and that brand spanking new freeway bypassed pretty much all of them while neglecting the 99 which actually connects almost all of those cities. Essentially, if the CA coastal elites tried to ram through another Valley bypass, the bloodbath would have been incredible. They would probably secede this time. Also, HSR in the middle of highways only works if the highway was built to accommodate HSR from the very outset and then HSR is just slotted in at a later date. The design standards for automotive highways impose very low speeds on the train making it non-high-speed. A car with rubber tires can take tighter curves and steeper grades. Trains take too long to accelerate and need to slow down too much for auto-spec rights of way. Basically, the fastest you can go in highway medians isn't fast enough for a high speed train, which is why you see so few HSR lines in the middle of highways. It's also a pretty terrible rider experience.

@@TohaBgood2 The I-5 is a surprisingly straight shot from the north end of the Tejon Pass to Sacramento. If highspeed rail had been included in the design when it was built all of those problems could have been solved. Rail should have been built then.

@@garygreen7552 Yes! Even if they hadn’t built HSR along the 5 then, they should have at least designed the roadway to accommodate future HSR. Unfortunately, the road lobby made sure that didn’t even make it as a studied design alternative. To be fair, this was considerably more expensive, but still cheaper than not doing it. What we have now with the 5 is simply not compatible with HSR. It looks mostly straight on a map, and it does have good straight wide sections. But if you zoom in, you’ll see not only curves that are too aggressive for HSR, but also changes in elevation and very narrow sections as well. At this stage what do you do? Viaducts and trenches? Extremely expensive! Hop in and out of the median? Crazy amount of engineering and very expensive. Choose the longest section along the highway you can find and when you have to hop out of the median continue through the fields? Well, this is exactly the plan CHSR chose! Only they did it next to the 99 and the UP ROW, where most of the passengers live.

So Cal should of converted the Pacific Electric system into the Monorail. That would of been awesome.

@@robserrano8971 Awesome, but extremely impractical and expensive. Don't get me wrong, I wanted monorail to succeed too. But it simply refuses to be a practical transportation option. Monorails, if they even survive being torn down due to the expense of keeping a white elephant going, are always some kind of a custom turnkey system. They are never "just standard monorail". No, because that doesn't exist. Instead, it's always a custom system that locks you into whatever vendor you originally chose. This is always more expensive than it needs to be and sometimes many times more expensive. You are basically a hostage of that monorail manufacturer as soon as you sign the contract. Needless to say, almost all monorail systems eventually abandon plans for extensions and opt to start from scratch with conventional electric rail. The only exceptions are areas where monorail actually is the only system that makes sense, i.e. geographies where normal rail isn't an option. But those are few and far between, so we get what we get.

this is only in the west. in japan and china things are different. especially in japan.

Thanks very much!

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ZDOI0cq6GZM.html

I don’t understand why you can’t just build them above the freeway. To free it up a bit.

@@ok.ok.5735 bruh I don’t think you got the joke

I live in North Haverbrook. There never was no monorail!

@@brianpan6453 Well … not any more … ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ZixyPdNhrxE.html

Thanks a lot! 😊 Don't worry, there's still many stories from Oregon history that I plan to cover here (including my next project).

There's a point where the blame has to be placed squarely on the shoulders of the voters. If you keep electing the same incompetent, corrupt politicians into office because you're "unsure" or "scared" of the opposition, then you deserve to be continually handed disappointment and failure year in and year out. Stop being complacent and lazy and start taking your livelihood back into your own hands.

Interesting, is that the same one that was planned for Anaheim in the 90s? I'll try to remember to track down that model next time I go through that airport.

@@peterdibble there were a few monorail proposals throughout Orange Country around that time, and would have likely all connected to form a single network. There are some archived LA Times articles online you can read. I remember seeing the model years ago while at JWA, so I’m not entirely sure it’s still there. When I saw it it was near the John Wayne statue near the center of the airport.

Knew someone beat me to it. Cheers.