Disneyland Monorail Blue
I am an unapologetic monorail fanboy. I spent much of my youth reading opinion pieces on the Monorail Society and wishing I had a ride-able monorail like Kim Pederson's backyard Niles Monorail. I have seen the Disney monorails on both coasts operating safely and efficiently for years (well other than the pesky air conditioning issue at Disneyland with the Mark VII's). It has always remained a tantalizing mass transit rail solution, which has been ignored time after time.
Usually modern critics of monorail can be grouped around a few shared points. One is dismissing the concept as a "gadgetbahn" belonging in the same pile of rail history as the Hyperloop and the vacuum railway. This dismissively ignores that much of monorail operation is a solved technical issue, and that systems much older than the Twitter/YouTube NUMTOTs who fling the term around have operated with strong safety records for decades.
The second common critique is an almost emotional one, pointing at The Simpsons' "Marge vs. the Monorail" a frankly brilliant piece of satire from the golden age of The Simpsons, and turning a comedy piece into some sort of "ultimate criticism" of monorail as a concept. This ignores that The Simpsons was lampooning poorly planned and executed mass transit projects in a wide brush (note George Takei had been asked to guest star in the episode but due to his association with the San Francisco Board of Transportation he turned it down and the show casted Leonard Nimoy as their Star Trek guest star for the episode instead). If a similar episode were written today it would probably be more likely to be "Marge vs. California High Speed Rail" or "Marge vs. One More Interstate Lane" since the punchline was always about mishandled public projects and not monorail itself as a concept.
Regardless the popular YouTube and Twitter urbanist pages preach their anti-monorail spiel; so I feel oftentimes like Don Quixote against the windmills when it comes to trying to get railfans to take the concept seriously. My eye will always drift towards the "highway in the sky" when I am at a Disney park, and will watch the sleek vision of "the future that could have been" roll by as it has done since 1959.
Disneyland Monorail Blue
I am an unapologetic monorail fanboy. I spent much of my youth reading opinion pieces on the Monorail Society and wishing I had a ride-able monorail like Kim Pederson's backyard Niles Monorail. I have seen the Disney monorails on both coasts operating safely and efficiently for years (well other than the pesky air conditioning issue at Disneyland with the Mark VII's). It has always remained a tantalizing mass transit rail solution, which has been ignored time after time.
Usually modern critics of monorail can be grouped around a few shared points. One is dismissing the concept as a "gadgetbahn" belonging in the same pile of rail history as the Hyperloop and the vacuum railway. This dismissively ignores that much of monorail operation is a solved technical issue, and that systems much older than the Twitter/YouTube NUMTOTs who fling the term around have operated with strong safety records for decades.
The second common critique is an almost emotional one, pointing at The Simpsons' "Marge vs. the Monorail" a frankly brilliant piece of satire from the golden age of The Simpsons, and turning a comedy piece into some sort of "ultimate criticism" of monorail as a concept. This ignores that The Simpsons was lampooning poorly planned and executed mass transit projects in a wide brush (note George Takei had been asked to guest star in the episode but due to his association with the San Francisco Board of Transportation he turned it down and the show casted Leonard Nimoy as their Star Trek guest star for the episode instead). If a similar episode were written today it would probably be more likely to be "Marge vs. California High Speed Rail" or "Marge vs. One More Interstate Lane" since the punchline was always about mishandled public projects and not monorail itself as a concept.
Regardless the popular YouTube and Twitter urbanist pages preach their anti-monorail spiel; so I feel oftentimes like Don Quixote against the windmills when it comes to trying to get railfans to take the concept seriously. My eye will always drift towards the "highway in the sky" when I am at a Disney park, and will watch the sleek vision of "the future that could have been" roll by as it has done since 1959.