Imagine getting in your car in the morning and falling asleep on your way to work. Unless you have a chauffeur, this is bound to be very bad news. But in the world of a not too distant future this could be an everyday occurrence. The car of the future will drive on a monorail. You wouldn’t have to steer it, it would be on a track - a track embedded with sensors to know where your car is at any moment. In this car, you would get in, have a seat and type in your destination on a keyboard. The onboard computer would then do all the rest; getting you to your destination on the most efficient route then available. This leaves you free to relax, enjoy the sights, sit back and watch a movie or television, work from a computer, telephone your friends, or even sleep! You could even drink and drive without worry or have a meal with a friend on a table that could pop up in the middle of your "cabin" space. Freeing your eyes, hands, legs, and mind from the control of the vehicle, you could get creative as to how you spend your traveling time. This will revolutionize the world of commuting. The stress and strain of driving, traffic, and other hazards of the road will be a relic of the past.

This technology is available today even though there is so little support, in terms of research and finance, to bring this superior mode of travel into being, particularly here in the US. Many countries have begun to see the benefits of having a monorail system and are expanding both research and installation. There are working monorails in Japan, Sweden, Australia, Germany, Canada, Korea, Denmark, and a number of other countries. This is time-tested technology that is continually ignored and its benefits downplayed. In large part, this is due primarily to the competitive warfare of the auto industry, and their powerful lobbying interests in political policy-making. "The first large scale urban streetcar abandonments were orchestrated by General Motors in 1925. GM went on to bankroll National City Lines (buses), which began buying up streetcar companies, and, with Standard Oil of California (Chevron), Phillips Petroleum, Firestone Tire and Mack Truck, tore out the tracks in eighty-five American cities." (*1) It may be many years before monorails succeed in replacing the environmentally degrading system of cars and roads now in operation. This new system will radically alter our everyday world to a large degree. There would no longer be a use for gas stations, traffic police, car insurance, auto repair and body shops, tow trucks, road service, tires, transmissions, mufflers, and a host of other car-related products and services. (I'm not so sure I myself would miss these very much.) This would certainly change the economy from its present state and there are many sectors of the workforce which would be affected, some being eliminated entirely. This, of course, also scares a lot of people about the benefits of the monorail system. Ironically, there has only been one recorded instance of death on a monorail in this century, making it, hands down, the safest method of travel of all modern power-driven systems.

Taking the responsibility out of the hands of the individual driver, a computer-controlled track and car would have no "accidents". There would be no drunk driving, or sliding on ice or rain-slicked roads. You couldn’t fall asleep at the wheel; there would be no more vehicle-related injuries and deaths. There would be no roads on the ground so there’s nothing to collide with, no intersections. This would eliminate the need for traffic police and free up these forces for the prevention of crime, thereby directly enhancing our quality of life. No longer would we be faced with suspended licenses, or jail sentences for driving-related offenses. The world could breathe a lot easier without all that carbon monoxide and fumes everywhere. You can't run out of gas and you'll never get a flat tire. Traffic jams will be a thing of the past. It seems to me that insurance companies and lawyers would stand to lose a lot of revenue from such a fail-safe transport system such as the monorail. I have no answer as to what would happen to this kind of service provision. It would surely be severely scaled back but perhaps this isn't such a bad thing for most of us. Each year, more than 500,000 people die in road accidents. 70 percent of these deaths are in first-world countries. Two-thirds of these deaths involve pedestrians, of which one-third are children.(*2)

The monorail is capable of actually being a profitable venture as opposed to the cost of operation and maintenance of any other rail system. The monorail in Seattle, WA was built in 1962 and is in operation to this day, run by a private corporation which pays the city of Seattle $75,000 a year to operate it. The monorail line from Tokyo to Haneda in Japan is privately owned and has been a money-making venture since it first started in 1964. Each day, the US spends about $200 million to build and rebuild its roads. Over $13 billion is spent each year to maintain its roads and highways yet it is estimated to cost over $26 billion a year to maintain them in their present condition. The roads are deteriorating and at the same time our usage is increasing. In 15 years congestion will be three times as bad, even if the amount of roads increase by 20 percent.

Together with the technology of magnetically levitated (maglev) cars, this method of travel is extremely quiet and capable of high speeds, perhaps even as fast as 350 miles per hour (*3). Another system being studied at this time is the pneumatic propulsion system. This is done with air pressure pumped through the track which pushes against a pressure plate on the bottom of the car. Both of these operate very quietly and require no motor within the car. There are absolutely no moving parts, no gears, no attachments of any kind. The maglev trains hover between 6 to 8 inches above the track. Friction is reduced to zero which eliminates any possibility of bumps, rattles, squeaks, and shakes. Riding on the maglev train is a quiet, smooth, comfortable ride. In addition, the lack of friction greatly enhances performance, needing much less energy to move the car than it would on a conventional road. There is also a way to get back the energy used for braking the vehicle and reuse it to accelerate.

It may be a long time before we can implement this wondrous mode of travel but at some point in the future there will be no more roads cutting up the precious land nature provides us with. The countless criss-crossed roads of our present transportation infrastructure, which have destroyed the natural habitats of many of nature's plants and animals, will no longer be necessary. This fragmentation process has severely curtailed our biodiversity in the last half of the 20th century. In elevating our powered transportation off the Earth, animals will be free to roam without the threat of being run over or fenced out of land areas. Delicate fauna may flourish with the connecting up of larger tracts of land. We might be able to stem the tide of alarming rates of disappearance of Earth's more fragile species. "Approximately one million animals per day are killed on U.S. roads. Cars are the leading cause of death of endangered species such as the mountain lion in Southern California." (*4)

Monorail cars, due to their simplicity, are maintenance-free. There are no - tires, radiators, drive shafts, transmissions, shock absorbers, spare tires, fuel gauges, catalytic converters, tailpipes, and a vast array of machined parts, no motor to break down, no moving parts whatsoever. Much less baggage to carry around in terms of gross vehicle weight. This makes them easier to move, consume less energy, and cost less to operate than any automobile.

If the cars are kept to a small minimum of people per car, they can be built lightweight and make construction of the infrastructure even simpler in design. In this system, cars kept to a 600 pound maximum can have a track built at less than $1 million per mile, compared to today’s present cost of $24 million per mile for a typical highway. In a more conventional monorail system with cars weighing up to 100,000 pounds, the infrastructure necessary to sustain this kind of weight would drive the price upwards of $40 million per mile.(*6)

There are as many ways to see how the monorail system may evolve as there are kinds of travel available today. In addition to owning a personal vehicle that may only seat one or two people, there could be progressively larger models to accommodate more travelers or even having larger space to move cargo. There is also the definite possibility of a taxicab service - with no taxi drivers. You could call on the phone and have a car delivered to your door, charge the ride to your bank account, credit card or company account. Lease by the week, the month or the year if you desire. Tour vehicles could be programmed to take you specific places and have accompanying audio and video to augment the tour. Have a lavish "home on the road", with separate rooms or a streamlined one person pod. Connect a bunch of them together in a chain for efficient travel on long distance rides traveling at higher speeds. Open up a retail shop out of your traveling store, having the ability to go to homes or to city centers where large volumes of people shop, or to flea markets where rows and rows of personal pod monorail vehicles are lined up like little shops. Perhaps commuting diners will be the rage in the coming century. Instead of going out to your favorite restaurant, you could have it come to you... or see the sights while you dine. A special track could be set up for cars traveling at a leisurely pace; riding along the ocean at sunset, or through the woods in the morning for breakfast. Cars could be sent from one place to another without passengers as a courier service. Order merchandise and have it arrive within the hour. Order your groceries on the Internet and delivered on a monorail to your home. The possibilities are staggering.

In January of '99, I had the opportunity to ride the monorail recently opened in Jacksonville, Florida. The track presently runs from one side of the city to the other, ringing it in a northerly direction with a fork at one end headed east and the other more in a southerly direction. The train is completely computer controlled, has no driver, and runs on rubber tires with the motor in the train itself. Two cars are coupled, each with a seating capacity of 6 to 8 with added room to stand for perhaps as many as 10 or 12 more in each cab. Its maximum speed I would gauge at 35 MPH, although it may actually be more or less. The cost to ride was a mere 35 cents (compared to NYC's subway at $1.50). Talking to a rider on the monorail who lived in Jacksonville, he affirmed that the monorail gets a lot of use and is extremely handy during the day to get from one side of the city to the other when the streets can be gridlocked and take a substantially longer amount of time to go by car. The view, is spectacular, especially at night when all the buildings are lit up and the bridges are lined in blue neon.

A system of monorail as extensive as the road system in place today will do for bodies what the Internet has done for minds: bring the world a lot closer than ever before. Then again, if science truly finds a way to scramble one's molecular structure, turn it into information, send it via electromagnetic pulse through the air into another physical location and then reassemble that genetic material into the "me" i once was, we may not need a monorail to travel on in the first place. Although I must admit there's a certain charm about this "Star Trek transporter" mode of travel, I'm not sure I'd want to use this radical approach to movement any time soon. As I see it, the monorail looks like one of the cleanest, safest, most comfortable, most efficient, and fun ways to travel.

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