Kim Pedersen was only a boy in 1959, the year Walt Disney unveiled a monorail at its first theme park, instantly turning its people mover into an iconic image of future transportation.

“When I first saw the monorail it looked like a rocket ship. I didn’t understand how it stayed on the beam. I did expect to grow up and see them everywhere,” said Pedersen, 59.

But the California founder and president of the Monorail Society, laments that Disney has been the making and the undoing of monorail technology, at least in North America.

“Unfortunately that got (monorails) typecast as an amusement park (attraction),” he said.

Enter Toronto Councillor Doug Ford and his waterfront vision of a mega-mall, hotel and giant Ferris wheel all fed by a monorail. What exactly the mayor’s brother means by monorail still isn’t clear.

Many people apply the term to any elevated train. In fact it’s a specific technology. Unlike streetcars or subways, a monorail is built to straddle a concrete centre beam. Typically, rubber wheels sit laterally under the vehicle running along that beam. Rubber tires, driven by electricity, run underneath.

The Toronto Zoo “monorail,” which closed in 1994 after people were injured in two crashes, didn’t fit the definition, although it ran within a concrete guideway.

Smaller monorails used as people movers run on a loop because the track can’t intersect. You can’t switch a concrete beam. Others run two parallel tracks on which the trains move in opposite directions. That means someone travelling from A to B doesn’t have to go all the way around the loop to return to their starting point.

Like most people, Pedersen finds the Ford vision vague. But the California dreamer doesn’t entirely dismiss the idea for Toronto.

“(Monorails) are being built still. They must be valid to somebody,” he said, noting that heavy industrial hitters such as Bombardier and Hitachi sell the technology.

The Monorail Society’s exhaustive website, that serves about 6,000 members, lists examples all over the world, many in Asia, the Middle East and South America. A lot of them run as shuttles for zoos, shopping malls, airports and theme parks.

But some are part of serious public transit networks. Sao Paulo, Brazil, will open two 24-kilometre lines furnished with Bombardier trains, in 2012 and 2014, says the website.

A 6-kilometre monorail through the Las Vegas strip carries about 30,000 people daily, only about 10,000 fewer than the TTC’s Scarborough Rapid Transit (SRT) line. But because it runs behind the hotels many people don’t know it’s there and it hasn’t met its potential, says Pedersen.

Still, it’s in the unique position in the public transit world of paying for itself, he said.

“Once you get them built they’re very economical. They are rubber tires running on a perfectly smooth road. They don’t get blow outs. With steel rail you’ve got to grind the tracks and wheels. There’s a lot more maintenance,” said Pedersen.

As for its viability in Toronto, that depends on exactly where and who it’s supposed to move — details which have yet to be revealed.

U of T Cities Centre director Eric Miller dismisses as a cartoon, a map of Ford’s proposed monorail route.

“I am confident there’s been no technical assessment for this thing at all? Where would you put the (train storage) yards? How would you put it over the Gardiner?” he said, adding that an elevated monorail would have to rise high above the expressway or run underneath it.

Although there’s nothing wrong with the technology, Miller can’t see the benefit of a monorail over its cousin, light rail, which costs about the same. The Ford image seems to be one of an elevated train, but like streetcars or subways, monorails can run at street level or underground.

“The big problem with elevating things is you’ve got this structure looming over you. The only possible advantage monorail has is its narrow profile,” he said.

But there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with monorails, said Miller. They’re safe and they can move about the same numbers as light rail.

When it comes to Ford’s waterfront plan, however, Miller says, “The monorail is the least stupid part of this whole project.”

Canadian monorails

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The Expo '67 Minirail had three separate track loops covering most of the Montreal fairgrounds. One loop remains as part of La Ronde amusement park.

The monorail from Vancouver’s Expo ’86 was packed up and re-assembled in 1987 at the Alton Towers theme park in England where it was launched by former Star Trek actor William Shatner.

Source: The Monorail Society website

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