The Seattle Monorail, again.
Meanwhile, on Monday, one of the two monorail cars in Seattle suffered a traction motor fire and ended up with large holes burned in it. This monorail was filled with people, and the city ended up bringing in fire trucks (no catwalks on the line) to evacuate it, because, for some reason, they couldn't get people across to the other monorail car?
Nobody died, thank goodness, and nobody had to jump for their life either, so in the grand scheme of things everything worked out. I don't know what the reaction of the monorail loons is (the big monorail loon website is basically the equivalent of the John Birch society, with trolley cars taking the place of communists), but the anti-monorail loons (all libertarians, of course) are bringing out the usual crop of twittery about how this proves that the city (or the pretend private company that's building the new!, incompatable! Seattle monorail) is wasting money because
- People will have to jump to their deaths from at least a mile up! ((a) the fire inspector has mandated walkways, so that won't happen, (b) 60 feet max.)
- You can't move a monorail because if commuting patterns change you won't be able to change the route of the railroad to accomodate that (something that no doubt would come as a surprise to the various electric railroads that have done line relocations, abandoned old lines, and put up new lines when commuting patterns changed. But the anti-monorail loons are simple folk who can't really comprehend difficult things like civil engineering, so one must make allowances for their special needs.)
- It would cost money! (unlike highways, which spring up like mushrooms after a spring rain.)
I don't know if the monorail recall people are kooks or not, but if I lived in Seattle I'd look at their reason #13 as a reason to support the recall, even if the rest of their reasons sound like typical anti-transit frothing.
Update: I've been looking at some of the anti-monorail loon websites on the web over lunch, and I've come to the conclusion that monorails are kook magnets. Some of the anti-monorail loon websites are claiming that monorail beams can't be put over streets unless they put drip pans under the beams, and that this is some sort of deal-breaker for a monorail. WTF? I strongly suspect that any drippage from the monorail beam would simply drip down to the bottom of the beam, then drip off. So you put a little tiny pan underneath the beam. I can see how that would be a deal breaker to have a little tiny metal pan under a 3ft by 5ft main beam. Sheeesh!
But compared to the PRT supporters, the monorail and anti-monorail loons are sanity themselves. If the +/- monorail loons are like libertarians, the PRT supporters are like Lyndon Larouche (or George "war in our time" Bush) fans.