Video: How Los Angeles Rejected the Monorail
Steve Crise found this excellent video by Peter Dibbel on YouTube and wanted to share with our readers.
Los Angeles Daily News reporter Paul Weeks writes about the possibility of a monorail system starting construction in the coming year. The article is dated Wednesday, August 16, 1950. Many such speculative articles appeared in most, if not all of the newspapers in Los Angeles throughout the 1950s to the mid-1960s. In the first illustration the monorail looks to be traversing the Cahuenga Pass where the Pacific Electric tracks should be, while the second illustration appears to be a romanticized version of the monorail system traveling high above the streets on either Wilshire or Ventura Boulevards.
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All I can say is thank God LA never built a monorail, it would have been a mess that never worked.
The video was very interesting but overlooked two facts of life: monorails never actually became popular anywhere in the world and monorails shared the stage with other exotic things like magnetic levitation transit. Also high technology systems like BART became so expensive to maintain it tended to discourage anything beyond the basics of cheap light rail transit. It seems the economics of public transportation haven’t changed in a hundred years: do what you can with the money you have available.