The monorail is dead. Unless you’ve been trapped under the I-90 rockslide for the last week, you know that.

So, where to now? Will the plan get resurrected in the future? How long from now? Are we stuck with Sound Transit? And what about the transit problems that the monorail was supposed to address?

I’ll tell you what I think behind the curtain.

This version of the monorail is dead, killed by an inadequate funding source and the board’s ill-thought decision to drop Ballard and Crown Hill from the initial project. With the northwest side dropped, there was no reason for anyone in that area to vote for the project. Much of the monorail’s support came from the neighborhood in northwest and north Seattle — Ballard, Crown Hill, Blue Ridge, Broadview.Without a station in their future (or the possibilty that one day the Green Line could extend up Holman and 105th to meet the light rail at Northgate) they voted with their pocketbooks.

But, in Seattle, monorail projects are cylical. What is unusual about this iteration is that we got to the land acquisition phase — further than we’ve ever been. Five, ten, twenty years from now a new set of idealists will rise up to wave the monorail flag again. The monorail is not dead. It’s just pining for the fjords.

And the monorail will live as long as neighborhoods continue to feel slighted by the perceived Magnolia-Queen Anne-Capitol Hill-Mad Valley centricity of the city. When Cleve Stockmeyer tore West Seattle off a city map on election night, he expressed a long-seated animosity between the west and City Hall. The monorail would have given West Seattle a new connection to downtown. Now, you wonder if Charlie Chong’s attempts to get West Seattle to secede from Seattle weren’t so misguided. And there’s just as much animosity in the northwest and northeast neighborhoods, ones annexed in the 1950s but left underdeveloped. Broadview had funding for a new library ripepd away from it in the late 1960s so that the city could improve Sick’s Stadium for the expansion Seattle Pilots baseball team. The neighborhood is still touchy about the subject, something that has come up during the current Broadview library’s expansion.

Seattle and King County have not effectively served the transportation needs of northwest and west Seattle. As long as the city and county continue to neglect these areas, there will always be plenty of opportunities for monorail supporters to argue for what an auxiliary transit system could do for underserved areas.

As for Sound Transit, it keeps trucking along. In 5-7 years one should be able to ride from Husky Stadium straight to the airport. In another generation, one may be able to ride to downtown from Issaquah or Redmond. But it’s still an expensive system to build and maintain, and its scale is so large that it’s highly unlikely that you’ll ever see a light rail station on SW California or NW Holman. Something in between the local bus services and rail needs to be added to these neighborhoods. The question is whether it will be a expanded and improved bus system that includes express feeder routes, or whether those feeder routes will be served by a monorail system.

Related posts:

1. monorail : the long goodbye
2. The Alaskan Way… Monorail?
3. monorail : another stop closer to death
4. Monorail: A Failure of the Public Initiative System?
5. Dreaming of a better way