How Seattle's Monorail Proposal Crashed And Burned

The Seattle Monorail was supposed to represent the future of transportation. Now the monorail proposal is "a smoldering wreck." What happened?

1 minute read

October 10, 2005, 10:00 AM PDT

By Chris Steins @planetizen

"Today Seattle's monorail proposal is a smoldering wreck. The mayor, the unanimous city council, and the newspapers have all done about-faces and have turned against the proposal. So have the citizens: a recent poll shows 52 percent of Seattleites would now vote to cancel the monorail. What happened? Events of the past few weeks show that even a tax-and-spend bastion of social engineering such as Seattle will revolt when faced with a public works dollar figure so vast that it can only be understood in dollar-bills-laid-end-to-end-would-reach-Mars metaphors."

Thanks to PreservingtheAmericanDream Listserv

FULL STORY: Monorail! - Seattle's great mass transit project becomes a "Simpsons" punchline.

Sunday, October 9, 2005 in The Weekly Standard

Transportation Washington

I love the variety of courses, many practical, and all richly illustrated. They have inspired many ideas that I've applied in practice, and in my own teaching. Mary G., Urban Planner

I love the variety of courses, many practical, and all richly illustrated. They have inspired many ideas that I've applied in practice, and in my own teaching.

Mary G., Urban Planner

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