An extensive monorail segment was planned for Houston that nearly made it all the way though the approval process. But, an election that resulted in a change of Mayors destroyed its political support. Still, the experience gained in developing a turnkey approach to financing, designing, building and operating the monorail in Houston's plan is highly relevant to the Seattle situation. An evaluation of this experience has been conducted for the Federal Transit Administration and the Executive Summary of this evaluation report is provided for your review. Background information about various monorail technologies currently in operation around the world is also available.
Several monorails are currently in use in Japan and more are being planned.
A recent review of Japanese urban transit activity is available. Quicklinks to web pages that describe several monorail technologies from around the world are provided. This routing would also allow Metro to take hundreds of daily runs of the 43 bus and reallocate those runs to other routes, in fact increasing transit access from neighborhoods to the RTA stations, and monorail stations. The NE and SE Seattle legs of the monorail concept would totally duplicate the RTA's LRT, and probably do the job of subregional transit service much better. The RTA funds are a committed reality for a nonsense LRT system in terms of ever serving regional travel movements.