Its Not Elon Musks Hyperloop But Car-Clogged L.A. May …

A rendering of the Van Nuys monorail station in the San Fernando Valley.

Clogged roads, like sunshine, are an immutable part of Los Angeles life, but local officials are considering an audacious fix for commuters on the citys west side: a sleek, automated $6.1 billion monorail to whisk riders above soul-crushing freeway jams. It would be the biggest use of a technology for transit in the U.S. thats often relegated to amusement parks, airports and zoos.

Los Angeless transportation authority decided on March 25 to award up to $63.6 million to LA Skyrail Express, a consortium led by Chinese battery and electric-vehicle maker BYD thats aiming to build a 15-mile, eight-station monorail line over the 405 freeway. Those pre-development agreement funds cover a multiyear technical, architectural and operational assessment, not construction costs. A rival proposal for a $10.8 billion subway from a group led by construction giant Bechtel, running below the highway, also won PDA funds worth up to $69.9 million. A decision on which option to build is due by 2025, according to L.A. Metro.

For this corridor theres been a 40-year history of proposals for many different types of technologies, monorail being a couple of those, says Tom Stone, senior adviser to the Skyrail team, which includes John Laing Group, a U.K.-based infrastructure investor, Swedish construction company Skanska and top-ranked U.S. architectural firm Gensler. I'm almost glad it didn't happen earlier because over the last 20 years the technology has advanced so much.

The proposed monorail would run down the median of the 405 freeway, with stations located off the heavily trafficked stretch of road.

Dozens of transit systems around the globe, notably in Germany and Japan, have long used monorails. New-generation systems have opened in China and are under construction in India; So Paulo and Bahia, Brazil; Cairo; and Bangkok. Construction of the L.A. project would mark a U.S. breakthrough other parts of the country might follow. Maryland transportation officials are also studying a monorail to run above the I-270 freeway in suburban Washington D.C.

BYD has built multiple monorail lines in China and is supplying technology for projects in Brazil and elsewhere. The company, 8.2% owned by Warren Buffetts Berkshire Hathaway, has also forged ties to Los Angeles, locating its North American headquarters in the city and selling it electric buses built at a BYD factory about an hour north in Lancaster, California. The facility would build monorail cars for the Skyrail project. A preliminary review of the monorail proposal by the Los Angeles County Transportation Authority ranked it the top choice based on factors including cost and technical feasibility.

A speedy electric monorail is far from the most extreme proposal for the city. Tesla and SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk has proposed vacuum-tube hyperloop trains as the ultimate transit solution and a tunnel under the 405 with high-speed passenger pods. But his L.A.-based Boring Co. wasnt a contender for county transit funds.

Long-time L.A. transportation guru Martin Wachs, professor emeritus at UCLA and University of California, Berkeley, and a RAND Corp. researcher, is skeptical but open to the possibility a monorail could work in L.A. Hes less supportive of Musks tube-train idea: He says things like that. I don't think he'll deliver.

The consortium seeking to build a Los Angeles monorail proposes running the line all the way to LAX.

The goal of the competing monorail and subway proposals is some relief for the Sepulveda Pass portion of the 405, one of the most congested stretches of highway in the United States. The pass is a low point in L.A.s Santa Monica Mountains, snaking beneath foothills that are home to The Getty museum and luxury Bel Air and Brentwood enclaves, that has bedeviled transit planners and commuters for decades. The Skyrail line would run in the median, above the 405 freeway. Hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day drive up and down that section of freeway, and it often moves at a crawl even on weekends and non-rush hour periods. Traffic researcher INRIX ranked it the ninth-most congested U.S. highway segment in 2019. (Things eased in 2020 because of the pandemic, but volume is rebounding to pre-Covid-19 levels in 2021, INRIX tells Forbes.)

It's a lot like a bridge over a waterway. Traffic is funneled into that path, the way traffic is funneled onto the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, Wachs says. There are few alternative routes.

Proposed monorail stations would be in the San Fernando Valley, The Getty museum, UCLA and LAX.

The Skyrail group says its quiet, elevated line would shuttle passengers from the Van Nuys commuter rail station in the San Fernando Valley to subway and light rail stations in west Los Angeles in 24 minutes. Given expectations of high demand, the goal is to operate six-car trains departing at two-minute intervals capable of carrying about 14,000 passengers per hour in each direction, according to L.A. Metro. The system will be designed to exceed that if necessary and operate eight-car trains, Skyrails Stone says. The group has also proposed an extended line to Los Angeles International Airport and says the entire project from the Valley to the airport can be built for less than $9.5 billionthe amount of funding Los Angeles has access to via its massive Measure M transit funding pool.

Monorail fans, especially science fiction author and L.A. resident Ray Bradbury, now deceased, touted the futuristic elevated railways as a cheap, easy-to-build transit option well-suited to Southern California, starting in the 1960s. L.A. is a Mediterranean area; our weather is sublime, and people are accustomed to traveling in the open air and enjoying the sunshine, not in closed cars under the ground, Bradbury wrote in a 2006 opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times. And although a monorail in nearby Anaheim has ferried Disneyland visitors since 1959, such transit systems have made little headway as a U.S. mobility solution. The technology was skewered as a boondoggle in a 1993 episode of The Simpsons written by Conan OBrien, Marge Vs. The Monorail. Bankruptcy filings by the privately run Las Vegas Monorail in 2011 and 2020 didnt help its reputation (the citys convention and visitors authority has taken over that project). Transit researchers say challenges include costs that typically arent as low as hoped and operational efficiency that hasnt been as good as that of conventional train and subway lines.

A potential monorail station near a shopping mall in Los Angeles.

When you actually work out the numbers and do a careful and thorough design, and consider that in most places where a transit route is being contemplated it's being added to an existing network, it just hasn't penciled out, says Wachs. He remembers reviewing a monorail proposal for the 405 that was considered and rejected 50 years agoand discussions with Bradbury about monorails.

He didn't care about practical matters like soil conditions and the placement of overpasses. He was much more concerned about concepts and images and dreams, which is fine, Wachs says. The worlds a better place for having people who are visionaries, but it also needs traditional engineers.

L.A. is a Mediterranean area; our weather is sublime, and people are accustomed to traveling in the open air and enjoying the sunshine, not in closed cars under the ground.

Transit monorail lines do work well, such as those in Sydney, Australia and Japan, but they dont integrate easily into overall systems owing to unique track configuration, he says. It doesn't compete when doing a careful analysis and systematic comparison of alternatives, especially when a traditional, dual rail line is part of a larger system, because then the vehicles can move over the entire system.

Thats an important consideration as Los Angeles works to massively scale up and weave its transit system together. The current construction wave began with a new light-rail line from downtown to Santa Monica in 2016 and was supercharged later that year by a sales tax increase that provides at least $120 billion over four decades. The Measure M initiative is the largest local transportation measure ever passed in U.S. historytimes two, Mayor Eric Garcetti said at a March 18 press conference. The city is also pushing to complete multiple projects ahead of hosting the 2028 Olympic Games. Those include subway system extensions; an underground connector downtown to better integrate service on existing train lines; connecting LAX to new train stations; a light-rail line for the San Fernando Valley; and the competing Skyrail and subway proposals. All this at a time when ridership of public transit throughout the U.S. has been in decline because of the pandemic.

BYD adviser Stone says theres a monorail knowledge gap in the U.S. about how well monorail systems already work in dense urban environments in India, Japan and China. They haven't ridden on those systems, he says. Urban planners haven't seen them. They don't understand they really do operate at high speed and high capacity.

Proposed station at UCLA in west Los Angeles.

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Its Not Elon Musks Hyperloop But Car-Clogged L.A. May ...