There’s an outfit down in Silicon Valley — SMT Rail — that thinks they have a better idea for mass rail transit. But the way they’re marketing it isn’t going to make friends in San Francisco at least.
Their promotional video, which our friends on Muni Diaries found on YouTube, is so ludicrous, it’s hard to imagine anyone taking them seriously. Their idea is an updated, tech-rich version of a concept more than a century old: an upside-down monorail with the cars suspended from the rail (rather than riding on top as at Disneyland).
The giant faux pas is not the system itself (about which, more below). It’s where they chose to “demonstrate” it in their video: the F-line right-of-way along The Embarcadero. The surface level streetcars have been wiped out, replaced by this erector-set of towers and beams. At 2:52 in the video, you see a tangle of them about 30 feet off the ground going in all directions in front of the Ferry Building! Earth to SMT: we tried elevating transit on the waterfront once. It was called the Embarcadero Freeway. And it was loathed (except by some who used it as a handy off ramp, aesthetics and urban liveability be damned). And we tore it down.
To make their self-inflicted political wounds worse, the destination signs they show in the stations overwhelmingly show “Stockton Street.” Does that mean they’re aiming to supplant the Central Subway, too, with an aerial structure through the heart of Chinatown? (And it gets through the Stockton Tunnel how?)
Fact is, this kind of “pod transit,” where you summon a small vehicle that takes a few people to a specific destination, has been dreamed of for a long time. And small vehicle, automated aerial “people movers” (with less technology) have demonstrated their reliability and practicality at many airports, including SFO. (They’re building a pretty long one between BART and the Oakland Airport right now.)
IF the public would tolerate aerial structures in cities, that concept might indeed be effective in more places, IF the capital and maintenance cost of myriad pods (needed to move volumes like the F-line currently generates) were affordable. But it doesn’t seem like very savvy marketing to show the erector-set and pods replacing streetcars that Muni’s own Transit Effectiveness Program called “beloved.” And certainly not if they block views that so many people fought so hard to reclaim along our waterfront (even more beloved).
But hey, this same video shows the same little pods zipping across empty desert as the narrator intones, “Imagine San Francisco to Los Angeles in less than two hours” — 30 percent faster than the High Speed Rail project promises! And completely powered by thin-film solar panels on the rail — an unprecedented accomplishment. AND you can take your car in the pod too!
Yes. Well. Maybe the F-line is safe for a little while after all. 🙂
Oh, and on the subject of vehicles blocking views (yachts instead of pods), read John King’s story in today’s Chronicle. Wonder how many people knew that we could end up with a permanent yacht harbor replacing the spectacular open-water views on the E-line segment between Mission and Harrison? We didn’t.
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