Bradbury Promotes Monorails for LA's Future

Well, it's been a long time since I've posted anything here, but a bit of commentary by Ray Bradbury in the LA Times was just too interesting to pass up. Bradbury, looking at what he sees to be the pending permanent gridlock of Los Angeles and surrounding areas, finds a solution in a monorail. Or, really, a large number of them:

"The monorail is extraordinary in that it can be built elsewhere and then carried in and installed in mid-street with little confusion and no destruction of businesses. In a matter of a few months, a line could be built from Long Beach all the way along Western Avenue to the mountains with little disturbance to citizens and no threat to local businesses...

"They also have been virtually accident-free. The history of the monorail shows few collisions or fatalities.If we constructed monorails running north and south on Vermont, Western, Crenshaw and Broadway, and similar lines running east and west on Washington, Pico, Wilshire, Santa Monica and Sunset, we would have provided a proper cross section of transportation, allowing people to move anywhere in our city at any time."

Bradbury spends significant time recounting LA's decision to decline an offer by Alweg Monorail to build them a system for free, as long as Alweg got the contract to operate the system. The Monorail Society has a page looking at the city's decision, although considering their grossly misleading "Monorail vs. Other" page, it should probably be taken with a grain of salt. (Also, calling declining the monorail "LA's worst tansit decision" is debatable, especially considering the city had previously allowed one of the best streetcar networks in the world to be thrown to oblivion.)

I missed this blog. I'll try to post more moving forward.