Uncategorized

Riding A Rail

51 Comments

This is the anniversary of the opening of the Disneyland Monorail System in 1959.

monorail

I’m old enough to remember when monorails were the future of transportation. Back when I was nine I knew that by the time I became the age I am now, I would be zipping to and fro in a sleek bullet shaped train that glides on a single rail between gleaming skyscrapers that were all monuments to my greatness.

I never paused to wonder why such a great personage as myself would be traveling with the unwashed masses on the monorail.

Today, monorails seem to be doing all right in Asia and Las Vegas, but elsewhere, like at the Minnesota Zoo and in Sydney, Australia, they are on the way out.

Too bad, since I have a working HO scale model of Sydney’s Darling Harbor Monorail boxed up in my basement.

Most things, (the weather, the stock market, the Kentucky Derby, our transit choices in the next century) are hard to predict.

How will we travel 100 years from today?

51 thoughts on “Riding A Rail”

  1. The assumption among the well-informed these days is that mass transit is going to be far more important to us in the future. But we have created a society based on the model of automobile transportation, and we will not readily transition to the mass transit model that Europe seems to present. One of my favorite web sites is MinnPost, a source of consistently intelligent commentaries. A recent MinnPost article says that in spite of common wisdom, mass transit probably will not figure prominently in the future of the Twin Cities. I do expect that more development will occur in the future near light rail lines, and maybe we can even create neighborhoods where a person walking can get around and do a lot of basic shopping without needing either a car or any mass transit.

    I am sure of how I will be traveling 100 years from now: by decomposing!

    Like

    Reply

    1. in Europe and in china there are people who can see 100 200 500 yers down the line and make decisions based on hat maes sense. in the usa no one sees further ahead than the next election and the popular vote. damn democracy and the little down falls that it sets in place. if only I were king….

      Like

      Reply

      1. This lack of planning for the future in our short sighted culture could become a very big problem if we don’t do more to deal with global warming.

        Like

        Reply

        1. If we do and ignore the fact that china and India can now afford cars but are poor third world countries that can’t afford to look after pollution standards we are screwed anyway

          Like

        2. China and India have been more willing than we are to cooperate with other nations on dealing with climate warming. I have heard that China actually is taking more action than we are to deal with climate warming. We are consuming much more of the world’s resources per person than countries like China and in the process are using massive amounts of fossil fuel that is causing global warming. We should be one of the leaders in dealing with global warming, but we are not. It is difficult for other countries to come up with a world plan for this when we wouldn’t cooperate.

          Like

  2. Good morning. There will be an end to traveling by vehicles powered by gas and diesel fuel. We could continue to have cars powered by electricity. I hope we have a lot more mass transit and do more walking or biking.

    What about travel by air. Those planes use lots of fuel that will eventually be in short supply. Is there any alternative to our current use of planes for rapid long distance travel that can cross oceans? Perhaps tunnels under the oceans? Is there any chance that teleportation can work? Maybe super fast boats of some kind.

    Like

    Reply

    1. A super fast boat would be a tough sell for me, Jim. The windburn / sunburn combination along with motion sickness is a huge deterrent. Teleportation sounds nice, as long as you don’t look too closely at the details. Too bad you can’t rent space in some foreign person’s brain for a few days and then just e-mail yourself into their skull. Of course with my luck the server would be down when its time to e-mail myself back home.

      Like

      Reply

      1. Dale, I am also not too sure that I would like supper fast boats or teleportation. It just seems to me that they are options that might be considered. Actually, I am not too fond of taking long flights by airplane. I do like traveling to distant countries and I hope a good way to make long trips can be found.

        Like

        Reply

        2. If the super fast boats serve supper, I suppose it might be fast food. It wouldn’t take much effort to provide food as good as some the food they are now serving on planes. Thank you for noticing my latest “creative” spelling effort, Edith.

          Like

        3. I try to curb my digs at typos and creative spelling some, but that one was too good to pass up, Jim.

          Like

  3. im going with tunnels. underground tubes to get you from a to b. no need to take down buildings of trees. just get a digger that bores through the necessary ground mass to get me to the church on time. as for planes there will be a catapult system with enough g force to launch the plane to the upper atmosphere to take advantage of the solar possibilities on even the cloudiest day. reverse technology will be required. no one will design things this way until they are given the fact that this is the required criteria for design. helicopters are a natural. bucky fuller couldn’t fathom the notion of building miles and miles of roads that would require constand maintance and expense. helicopters present their own set of challenge but hey what is life without a little challenge. where does the heliport go on your house?

    Like

    Reply

    1. I’m looking forward to the development of slingshot technology, tim. As for housetop helicopters, now it will be painfully obvious to everyone in the neighborhood when the teenager next door gets home from his date. Can we get thuppa-thuppa-thuppa sound cancelling technology along with the copter boom?

      Like

      Reply

      1. My friend refers to the guys in the Hondas with the black windows air foil tails on the trunk and mufflers that make themselves sound like race cars as lau riders
        I’m not sure thumps thumps thumps is any different from that
        My sister lives by minnehaha falls and got the soundproofing done to eliminate the airplane flyover sounds and it makes a huge difference
        And what the heck is your son doing out that late anyway?

        Like

        Reply

    2. How about extending the current interest in getting our food from local producers to getting almost all of our needs locally. That would eliminate much of the need for the massive road system that Fuller didn’t like. In this case there would still be some roads or some kind of long distance transportation system, but it would be much less massive. Also, we could have a society where people could find plenty of good work locally and there would not be as much need to travel long distances to visit family members that have had to travel far from home to find work.

      Like

      Reply

    3. Living just a few blocks from a hospital, I have lived with the sound of helicopters taking off and landing at any time of the day or night and as a result don’t want anything to do with helicopters. They are incredibly noisy and even when they are 5 or 6 blocks away, they sound as if they are hovering for at least half an hour in my back yard whenever they come or go. At 2 am, it feels like an hour. I know they are saving lives with the work they do, but I hate the noise they make.

      Like

      Reply

      2. I don’t know Jasper’s technology but great minds do work alike
        The tube concept is so obvious once you plug it in its easy to see how to do it

        Like

        Reply

  4. Unlike Steve, I’ll be long done decomposing 100 years from now. I’ll be well into my next adventure, whatever that is. I’m hopeful that by that time, some effective and efficient mass transit solutions will be have been implemented globally, solutions that don’t involve standing in long lines with your shoes off while your luggage is being scanned before you’re herded into an overcrowded airplane. (Can you tell that I don’t relish the upcoming flight to Seattle?)

    Like

    Reply

  5. Similar to tim’s notion of tunnels, I’m thinking pneumatic tubes. Pop yourself into a little cylinder, key in your destination and shoop, off you go, just like those tubes at the bank to get your deposit into the teller from the drive up. Not sure how well that would work for long distance travel, but shorter commutes around town, it could work just swell. Might need two sets of tubes: one for smaller, private cylinders, a second larger one for mass-transit cylinders. Shoop – off we go to the beach! Shoop shoop…

    Like

    Reply

    1. Anna, if it works anything like the pneumatic tubes I use at the bank, I’ll shoop off to my far flung destination and will immediately have to shoop back home to get the pen I forgot.

      Like

      Reply

  6. What about the Wrinkle in Time concept? That might be great if they could work out the problems that L’Engle wrote about.

    Like

    Reply

  7. I sure hope we travel in space cars like The Jetsons, since multitasking while flying around in a personal jetpack will cause way too many accidents.

    Chris in Owatonna

    Like

    Reply

    1. Chris, what’s the jetpack equivalent of gridlock? With no clearly defined travel corridor, it would be airborne pandemonium, no? I don’t remember George Jetson traveling that way – I always picture him in one of those hovering bubble-dome cars.

      Like

      Reply

      1. Dale, I figure there won’t be gridlock with space cars since we’ll be using three-dimensions to travel in, rather than just two, so “freeways” will be twenty or thirty “layers” high, and people will pretty much travel in straight lines from place to place since we’ll have perfected driverless cars by then anyway, so no one will ever bump into anyone while driving.

        I only remember the bubble-dome cars, too, for the Jetsons. But those jetpacks look pretty darn cool, and I think have to be the closest thing to flying that man could do. Hang gliders and parasails aren’t really “flying”; more like “floating: or “soaring.”

        C in O

        Like

        Reply

  8. I’m a complete peak oil geek, so this is a dangerous question to be asking in my presence ;-). Of course, the future will depend very much on the preparations we make in the present, so timelines are hard to predict. That said, conventional oil has pretty much plateaued in the last decade, and unconventional (shale oil and the like) can’t live up to the current hype–it’s dirty, expensive to access and process, and has a steep depletion curve. So yeah, car culture as we know it will die, probably within Dale’s 100-year window.

    The problem with alternative tech is that it’s still supported by our fossil-fuel infrastructure. Rare earth elements, uranium, photovoltaic cells, silicon chips, plastic, steel, aluminum, asphalt or concrete roads, power transmission lines, not to mention agriculture, food processing, water systems and irrigation–everything in our culture has a fossil fuel dividend making it possible to manufacture, mine or grow, and when that goes away or becomes prohibitively expensive, our high-tech culture will crash multiple levels of complexity.

    I would guess 100 years will see a lot more bicycles and a lot more walking. Air travel is too energy-intensive to sustain. Trains and trams are possible, if we repair and expand our rail networks soon, and barge and boat travel will become a favored method once again for transporting goods. I don’t see a resurgence of draft animals, because all arable land will have to be used to support our huge population. That’s my feel-good prediction for the day, thanks for your time.

    Like

    Reply

    1. Nice detailed response, Crow Girl, but I’m discouraged by your prediction that there will be no resurgence in draft animals.
      What about goods strapped on the backs of domesticated felines? I’m thinking a network of delivery cats would add an element of whimsy to the distribution of goods. They’ll bring it at their own pace and give it to you only if they want to. The actual shipping would be free but you’d have to lay in a supply of canned salmon if you actually wanted to get your stuff.

      Like

      Reply

      1. Or why not giant rabbits? (I’m thinking Harvey) – imagine them taking great hops to achieve more speed…

        Like

        Reply

        1. Maybe we could get the weird giant rabbits they bred for Teletubbies – I believe those rabbits are out of work now and probably looking for gainful employment.

          Like

  9. Beaming. With a hundred more years to work with, we ought to finally be able to manifest Roddenberry’s ideas… Hope to be back later with more info on this.

    Like

    Reply

    1. I read a book a few years ago about the actual technology involved in Star Trek and it made beaming over seem like a physics impossibility. But I would like that the most as well.

      Like

      Reply

  11. My mom has told me that when she and my dad first moved to Minnesota, that they could get just about anywhere, day or night, in the Twin Cities by street car. (Even out to Lake Minnetonka, although I might be confusing that with Betsy & Joe’s honeymoon in the Betsy-Tacy books.) I remember when one of my daughters broke her arm at age 4, I had to take her to a clinic that was in Bloomington. It would have taken me about 15 or 20 minutes to drive there, but since I didn’t have a car during the day, I looked up the bus schedule and found out that it would take about 3 buses and 1 1/2 hours – one way – to get to the clinic from our house. Experiences like that make me wonder why they got rid of the streetcars and made it extremely difficult to get around if you don’t own a car or don’t always have access to one.If it worked so well, why on earth did they get rid of it?

    Like

    Reply

    1. I think part of the perception your mother has about being about to get “just about anywhere” on the streetcars may have more to do with the relative lack of sprawl in that era, rather than any innate superiority of the streetcar system. I found a transit map from 1933, and the lines that ran down Bloomington and Chicago Avenues didn’t go any further south than 54th St.

      Like

      Reply

  13. This question reminds me of one that was posed to Dr. Science (“…he knows more than -you- do…”). Someone once asked him why people couldn’t travel by fax. “You can!” he proudly announced. And he went on to explain how the warbling tones were the ‘fax chompers,’ reducing documents to bit and byte sized pieces of information small enough to by transmitted by wire. As I recall, he said that all you need is a dedicated phone line with enough data capacity. And lots and lots of ibuprofen.

    Like

    Reply

  14. Interesting ideas, all.

    Afraid that like Dr. McCoy of Star Trek, I’m squeamish about the idea of being beamed and then reassembled at my final destination.

    Neil Degrasse Tyson has pretty much scotched the idea of moving through the earth in the most direct route possible too :

    Personally, I worry that Wall-E got it right, and most people won’t actually “go” anywhere, they will just sit in a chair, beaming their brilliance out into the world via the ether, but will only take in whatever ideas they already agree with and find entertaining.

    What I’d like to hope is that by then, everyone will be so incredibly fit, that they will take themselves wherever they want to go by their own physical power, and won’t need to get into a box to get anywhere.

    Like

    Reply

  15. OK, VS is right, here’s the main problem with beaming:
    http://space.about.com/od/Space-and-Astronomy-Star-Trek/a/Instantaneous-Matter-Transport.htm
    puts it this way: “One could argue, I suppose that one could argue that the transportee is in fact killed during this step, and then reanimated when his or her atoms are reassembled at the desired location. But this seems like a very unpleasant process, and not one that a person would willingly engage in.”

    It seems that teleportation may be more feasible…

    Like

    Reply

Leave a reply to Barbara in Robbinsdale Cancel reply