Why monorail fail

It'll be harder to maintain, more expensive and won't link to anything else. In his book, A Short History of Trains, transport writer and broadcaster Christian Wolmar wrote: "[Monorails] have never overcome the basic problems of being expensive to build, and being inflexible due to the structural requirements of their rails.

While the UK continues to resist the allure of urban monorails, cities in other countries have embraced the concept with varying degrees of success. China, Japan and India have several monorail networks, with more planned, and they have also been built in Australia, Germany, the US and Malaysia.

He said: "Many monorail systems run on elevated tracks through crowded areas that would otherwise require the construction of expensive underground lines or have the disadvantages of surface lines. Alton Towers in Staffordshire has had one since the s. However, Chester Zoo's Zoofari monorail - built in - is being decommissioned as it no longer adequately spans the expanded attraction. People in the West Midlands still talk fondly about the monorail built to service the Merry Hill shopping centre near Dudley in The system was subsequently sold to a shopping centre in Queensland, Australia.

Perhaps the most high profile monorail failure in recent times was also in Australia - in Sydney. Opened in July to link Darling Harbour with the city's central business and shopping districts, the monorail struggled to capture the public's imagination and was closed in June Announcing plans to pull the whole thing down, New South Wales premier Barry O'Farrell said: "The monorail is not integrated with Sydney's wider public transport network and has never been truly embraced by the community.

That would be The Monorail Society. With more than 14, members in countries, the group has been espousing the benefits of monorails since The rest are found at amusement parks, airports or convention centres to ferry vistors. The global Monorail market, as per research reports, is expected to grow at a rate of 2 per cent and no big country, barring Brazil and Egypt, is now planning a largescale Monorail system. The plan to construct a Monorail line across the city was first mooted in with the appointment of a committee of bureaucrats and experts to identify possible routes.

The idea was to create an alternate transport system, which would weave through some of the most dense and congested parts of Mumbai. The plan, which had then looked sound, envisaged connecting the mill belt of Byculla-Parel that house many corporate offices to then sparsely-populated pockets of Wadala-Chembur belt.

There were allegations that the project was being pushed largely for the benefit of big-pocketed builders with stakes in the Wadala-Chembur stretch, as having a green field transport system abutting their buildings would add a premium to real estate projects in the vicinity. The Wadala-Chembur belt today is one of the costliest real estate destinations in Mumbai. In one of the fastest turnaround time for an infrastructure project in Mumbai, the tender for Sant Gadge Maharaj Chowk-Chembur-Wadala Road corridor was floated in November The project, which was initially expected to cost Rs 1, crore, was finally awarded at a cost of Rs 2, crore and was to be completed in 29 months.

The consultancy submitted a master plan and the state allowed the approval for building an eight-line Monorail system at a cost of Rs 20, crore. It was to be completed by Work on the project began in November and was expected to be completed in 29 months. Once functional, it was expected that 1. MMRDA officials had claimed that the Monorail would help reduce nearly 28, taxi and rickshaw trips and help in taking off the nearly 25, cars that traveled on this stretch.

However, once work commenced, the officials realised that the project had been poorly planned. The contractors were forced to undertake changes and alter the route after they realised that the Monorail could not pass through congested and narrow lanes, especially near Parel Tank Road.

The implementation kept on getting delayed because of lack of permissions from different authorities, difficulties of acquiring land, changes in route alignment and a slowdown in government decision making in the wake of the November terror attacks. The overall cost jumped to Rs 3, crores. Activists have long suspected that the monorail was pushed through to open up the vacant land in the eastern corridor of Mumbai to development, which will allow for more buildings.

Some major residential projects by big builders have already begun construction in the area, which offers tremendous future possibilities. The failure of the first phase of monorail has, however, cast doubt on any further expansion plans, which included a total of nine corridors.

Getting funding for them is going to be highly difficult. The shoddy planning and failure of a showpiece project have several lessons for city policymakers all over the country — that vanity projects taken up by governments and supported by politicians and urban planners for their own agendas do not end up serving the very people they are designed for.

He currently works for the Praja Foundation, Mumbai. About Us. Support Us Login. For short individual lines, that's not a big deal. But it's hard to scale up if you want far-reaching city-wide transit.

Even with those two big shortcomings, monorails can still be useful on individual lines that need to be fully elevated. And yet, we still don't see many built. This is because for big transit agencies with multiple lines, it's easier to maintain a fleet full of the same equipment than to keep parts and training current for a lot of different technologies simultaneously.

Obviously a lot of cities do have more than one type of train. Sometimes the same transit agency even runs multiple technologies. On its own this last point isn't enough to explain monorails' unpopularity. But combined with other problems, this further narrows the already small set of circumstances where monorails might be the best choice. There is a narrow set of circumstances where monorails are the most sensible option. If the technical details align, that is when you have a mostly elevated line that doesn't need many switches, and there's not a strong incentive to match an agency's equipment, then the positives of monorails can outweigh the negatives.