Well said, Ardecila. Monorails are a perfectly legitimate choice for transit depending on the location and the need. People love to use the Las Vegas monorail to dunk on the ineffectiveness of monorails, but the facts are that even though the monorail is super short and was built on a sub-optimal ROW (behind the strip instead of on it), it is still one of the very, very few transit systems in the world that is *occasionally* profitable. Profitable! Imagine that!
Connecting an island to the transit system on the mainland seems perfectly reasonable to me.
(Also, I too am very tired of the Simpsons monorail memes. I can't understand how people still think they funny.)
That said, there are some potential problems I see.
- The stub-end station at Miami Beach, as Ardecila already pointed out. Extending it down 5th street to the beach would only mean another 2,800 feet of track, but it would make a massive difference in the utility of the line.
- On the other end of the line, the monorail ends at a people mover station, presumably the Museum Park station. If they were to extend it another ~4,000 feet along I-395 then south along the FEC Railway, they could terminate at MiamiCentral! Connections to Metrorail, TriRail, the people mover, and even Brightline. Why on earth would you cut your line short of that kind of juicy connection? Do you want this line to fail?
That's it, actually. I was expecting to be upset by the poor frequency, but 12 departures per hour means a train every 5 minutes, which I like. 300-person capacity every 5 minutes means 3,600 people per hour per direction, which is about as good as many light rail lines get.
It also only takes two trains to run the line, meaning they can avoid the classic problem of monorails: switching. Each train can stay on its own track throughout the day, and the switches only need to operate when trains enter or exit service.
So I think a monorail is a very good choice for this route, with the caveat that they make the line about 1 mile longer to make better connections on either end. If they don't, then they'll have another Las Vegas monorail situation - a monorail to nowhere that people will hold up as an example of poor public transit infrastructure for many years to come.
The stats (from the article):
- Expected delivery date: 2026
- Length: The monorail would extend approximately 3.45 miles on the south side of the MacArthur Causeway.
- Capacity: There would be two trains constantly operating, with one spare, each holding up to 300 riders.
- Speed: The trains would run at 50mph, serving 12 trips per hour
- Fares: The consortium would work with the county to set a fare that provides the best value for residents and is integrated into existing ridership programs.
- Connectivity: The monorail’s mainland transit hub would serve as a stop for the County Bus and People Mover.