Posted by Floyd Diebel 6 Comments

Nerds, Monorails, and Total Letdown

When I was little I dreamt of a future filled with monorails, cities on Mars, personal jetpacks and flying cars that fold up into a briefcase for storage. Seems like my childish vision of a neat-o future was mostly based on transportation, and access to faraway places… and so far, none of this stuff has really happened.

My childish vision of a neat-o future was mostly based on transportation like monorails and flying cars existing.

A few years ago I had hope that Seattle was actually going to get a real monorail public transport system, but it failed miserably and they’re stuck with that touristy monorail from the world’s fair instead. The fact that Seattle’s monorail now runs through an aluminum Frank Gehry eyesore just makes the whole situation suck even more. Boo. Not even the simplest of my child-futurist dreams have been realized.

So what did we get instead?

The internet (thanks Al Gore), mobile phones, social networking, Viagra, and not having to rewind rental movies.

I feel totally gyped… like gypsies came to my house in the night, stole my dreams, and traded them to a nearby village for some livestock or something.

What a total letdown.

So umm. Sorry if I offended any gypsies or anything.

6 Comments
  • Well, at least we got a 3.7 trillion dollar bill to pay for the next three generations, hell foe that kind of money we coulod have built a magna lev rail system from the west cost to the east cost.)-:

  • There are a few monorail public transportation’s out there (you know about those?!), they may not be around the corner from you, but the engineers have visualized your dream before you even lived. Here is one in Wuppertal (around the corner from where I grew up) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwebebahn_Wuppertal (I think the oldest in the world) and than I believe they have those new suuuuuper fast once working on magnatic stuff. What else do you want?

  • @jim- Actually, that was included in the bill.
    It’s not maglev, but on the upside, the tech they’re using is less expensive and more reliable.

  • I was in an electrician vo-tech school in 1972 and the instructor showed me that if you took and electric motor and opened up the field windings and laid them flat and did the same to the armature you could have a magna-lev prime mover, sorta. But after much study and debate over the issue with no resolve all I can think is, man what a waste of time and money doing study’s. Build the damn thing and they will come.

Leave a Comment

Agency Journal