The above dilemmas only strengthen the case for a regional mass transit system (rather than the small circulator between downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods envisioned with guided buses). The system is designed so that both the Green and Blue line go through the heart of downtown and at the same time connect the auto-oriented suburbs and western parts of Milwaukee County with park-&-ride lots. This would make access to the city easier, and combined with pedestrian-friendly policies it could help to draw business back to the center of town, as well as allowing people to travel between the north and west parts of the county. Living close to a monorail station would have great advantages, and could help energize development in other areas (such as Walnut Street) as well.
In order to facilitate this more easily, I made some changes to the route plan, putting Brown Deer and River Hills in the initial system (rather than as an extension). I've also eliminated the large diagonal stretch of the Blue Line from Timmerman Field to Lisbon in favor of an extension of the Green Line's western freeway segment up Mayfair Road to Timmerman, providing greater access to Wauwatosa and to a lesser extent Waukesha County. Finally, I took the extension from Ryan Road from the list of possible extensions to part of the initial system, to provide better access to Franklin and Oak Creek, which, while their growth has slowed, are still the fastest-growing parts of the county.
I also realized that when I cut-and-pasted the HTML to create this page I didn't modify the title of it so it said "Frequently Asked Questions" in the title bar (the thing at the top of the page; I don't know what it's called on PCs)! I have now changed it to "Updates" which is much more fitting.
This is the first major update to milwaukeemonorail.info since May. Even if you have just been to the homepage, you have probably noticed major changes, most notably that the website is no longer promoting the SIPEM system found in Germany. There were several major flaws with using SIPEM. One of them was that it was too expensive, and I had to come up with a scheme of one-way lines and switches to make it work. This also had the side effect of lowering the system's capacity, making it less capable to deal with future growth. Any chances for expansion were also static--like guided buses, its maximum speed was a mere 45 miles per hour, meaning that it could not realistically compete with highways or serve as an alternative to expansion. Finally I was concerned about using relatively small, forty-five passenger vehicles without drivers. The absence of a driver could make the possibility of an assault in a vehicle more likely, and even though the cars could be coupled into two-car trains, travel between the cars would be impossible (for an excellent commentary on this read Make Mine Walk Through by Kim Pedersen). Almost immediately after I put up my website, I started receiving e-mails from monorail manufacturers about why their system wasn't on the website. I therefore started a massive reconsideration of what systems to include. There were four major guidelines for this:
These guidelines effectively eliminated every monorail option save one--London Metropolitan Monorail Company's Langen-type monorail. Although it seems relatively new, in reality it is simply an updated version of the Wuppertal Schwebebahn and industrial monorails (used in mines, factories, and the like) and there is very little truly new about it; the LMMC design is so close to the Schwebebahn that Her Majesty's Royal Railway Inspectorate considers the LMMC design proven in transit service. One may also notice that my criticism of guided buses is muted down. This is due to my own misunderstandings of technology--it's not as bad as I thought it was. Realizing that guided buses weren't bad for downtown also made me realize that the flaw in the proposed system was not in the choice of technology but in the fact that it is more of a short-term solution. Guided buses have equivalent operating costs to regular buses, meaning that unless there is a tremendous leap in ridership operating subsidies will probably remain fairly high, and therefore the system probably won't result in any savings for the Milwaukee County Transit System. Its speed is also limited so that fast-growing freeway-dependent regions in the North Shore and west are probaby unreachable. Langen monorail's biggest advantage is that it can serve an entire region, not just downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods.
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