While taking a summertime break this
week, here’s a column I wrote awhile back.
What is this
fascination that people have with monorails? I can’t tell you how
often people suggest them as “the answer” to our state’s clogged roads.
“Why don’t we build a
monorail down the middle of The Merritt Parkway?,” asked an architect at a recent meeting. To my astonishment, such an idea was once studied!
As lore has it, back
in the mid-1980’s local tech giant Sikorsky was asked by CDOT if a monorail
could be built and a plan was submitted. Sure, such a system could
be built, they concluded, but where would you put the stations and the necessary
parking?
Since hearing of this
white-whale of a tale, shared by Merritt Parkway
Conservancy Executive Director Wes Haynes, I have been on a relentless
search for details of the proposal, but I’ve come up empty. Sikorsky
has no record of the plan. CDOT said “Huh?”
Digging through the archives of the Stamford Advocate I found articles from 1985 discussing the
idea: a $700 million monorail down the median of the Merritt Parkway
from Greenwich to Trumbull as an alternative to Bridgeport developer Francis
D’Addario’s idea of widening the parkway to eight lanes… or double-decking I-95.
Motorists were
surveyed and CDOT apparently spent $250,000 for a study.
The amazing research
librarians at the State Library dug through their dusty files and came up with
a CDOT report from 1987 pooh-poohing the idea, not only on grounds of
impracticality but because it would compete with existing rail
service. Heavens no!
In 1998 a monorail was once
proposed for Hartford, connecting downtown to Rentschler Field in East
Hartford. It was to cost only $33 million and the cost was
supposedly to be paid by the Feds. It never happened. The
idea was revived again in 2006 when the Adriaen’s Landing convention complex
was opened, but again, nothing.
A pseudo-monorail
“People Mover” system was built at Hartford’s Bradley Airport in 1976
connecting the remote parking to the main terminal, all of seven-tenths of a
mile away. The fixed-guideway system, with cars designed by Ford
Motor Company, cost $4 million but never operated because the $250,000
annual operating was cost was deemed impractical. In 1984 it was
dismantled, though you can still see one of the original cars at the
Connecticut Trolley Museum in East Windsor.
Whatever your
fantasies are about space-age travel by monorail, let me dispel your dreams
with some facts.
Disney Monorail
Monorails are not
fast. The Disneyworld monorail, built by a Japanese
company, has a top speed of 55 mph but usually just averages 40
mph. Even on a bad day Metro-North can better that. The
3.9 mile long Las Vegas monorail does about 50
mph shuttling losers from casino to casino.
Monorails are
expensive. The Vegas system, opened in 2004, cost $654 million. That’s
why existing monorails like Disney’s have never been extended.
Tokyo Monorail
Monorails are not
Maglevs. Don’t confuse the single-track, rubber-tired monorails with
the magnetic-levitation technology in use in Shanghai and being tested
for passenger trains in Japan. The
Shanghai maglev can travel over 250 mph, the Japanese test trains have hit 374
mph.
No, monorails are not
in Connecticut’s future and are not the answer to our woes.
