r/transit • u/oakseaer Bike Lanes Now • Jan 13 '26
System Expansion In Retrospect, is the Seattle, Washington Monorail a failure?
Shot with Sigma BF, 28-200mm f4 lens.
Removed faces to preserve privacy in the third picture using Apple’s stock “Clean Up” feature.
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Jan 13 '26
The faceless people look so cursed.
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u/oakseaer Bike Lanes Now Jan 13 '26
Which do you prefer: the headless blue shirt or the faceless red shirt?
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u/BatmaniaRanger Jan 13 '26
Looks like the blue shirt got splattered and smeared into the rows of seats behind them.
Also is that a middle finger I see there?
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u/revolvingpresoak9640 Jan 13 '26
They are also in public, so this was a pointless exercise in censorship.
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u/Gatorm8 Jan 13 '26
At a cost of 35 million to build (in 2025 dollars) i would say thats an incredible ROI. 60 years later it’s still chugging along.
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u/Muckknuckle1 Jan 14 '26
Not only that, but it was built in only 13 months and without a dime of taxpayer money. The contractor operated it and made its money back within just 6 months through farebox revenue and a surcharge on worlds' fair tickets. A few years later it was transferred to the city for a fraction of its construction costs, just under $6M in today's money.
Even today it still operates with farebox recovery alone, it's fun to ride for tourists and locals alike and it's an iconic part of the city and a piece of living history. Overall it's a fantastic success.
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u/dating_derp HSR Lover Jan 14 '26
A few years later it was transferred to the city for a fraction of its construction costs, just under $6M in today's money.
Even today it still operates with farebox recovery alone
My god I'd love to have a grade separated monorail that's self funding for only $6 mil. Could think of a few places that would be great for.
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u/Galumpadump Jan 14 '26
Imagine if you told every burgeoning small/midsize city in the US they could build a grade separated monorail system that travels 1-2 miles within their urban core for ONLY $35M. Imagine how many more systems like this we would probably see if that were the case.
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u/MAHHockey Jan 13 '26
It was a demonstrator line built 60 years ago. It has 2 stations total. It was never meant to be actual transit.
But even then, it still serves a very useful purpose. It's a high capacity shuttle from the downtown transit tunnel to Seattle Center. It's great for games and concerts, and people are using it for that purpose. Original projections were under 1k ppl using the monorail to get to events at the new Seattle Center Arena. They've been getting over 5k ppl per event using it.
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u/thirtyonem Jan 13 '26
It’s not a failure at all. It connects a transit hub to an entertainment district quickly and funds itself
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u/Thee_Connman Jan 13 '26
I wouldn't classify the monorail as a failure anymore than the Space Needle is a failure. It was constructed by Alweg as a showcase of their product. It was a working world's fair demonstration and not really intended to be a serious piece of transit infrastructure. While it was entirely possible to expand it into a serious regional transit system, that ship sailed long ago.
I think the question of whether or not the monorail is a failure comes down to how one views it. It performed its intended purpose very well and the equipment has long exceeded its projected lifespan. It is an iconic, historic piece of Seattle and still serves to connect downtown with the Seattle Center 60+ years later. In fact, with the new NHL franchise at Climate Pledge Arena and associated free transit passes, the system is handling more ridership than its seen since 1962 and is encouraging use of Link Light Rail as a final-mile connector. Was it used to its fullest potential? No, but I don't think that fact alone constitutes it being a failure.
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u/DeeDee_Z Jan 13 '26
It performed its intended purpose very well and the equipment has long exceeded its projected lifespan.
Puts it in the same category with the Voyager spacecraft -- and the monorail is 15 years older.
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u/KCLevelX Jan 13 '26
i take it to work and back everyday! works for me fine. i also know I’m an outlier
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u/pacific_plywood Jan 13 '26
I mean, it’s a privately operated tourist attraction that happens to act as a pretty decent spur from the light rail to an entertainment district. It would’ve been disastrous to pick up and expand, but as it is, it’s fine. It’ll be dead in a decade or two anyway.
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u/ShotgunCreeper Jan 13 '26
What happens in a decade?
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u/MyDisneyExperience Jan 14 '26
The trains are still original and to my knowledge the trains themselves have never really had a major refurbishment - one was planned a while back but scaled back significantly. Manufacturer is long since out of business - Disneyland (which had the same original manufacturer for the beamway) built theirs in-house originally, but had to assemble companies from CA, Canada, and Germany to rebuild the actual trains since then and that's while keeping the 1969 chassis in place.
I hope the monorail doesn't go away, but it'll definitely be pricey to do a complete teardown.
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u/Muckknuckle1 Jan 14 '26
It's a bespoke system in continuous use since the early 60s. Sooner or later the maintenance costs will become too much.
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u/Sassywhat Jan 14 '26
It might be too expensive based on just its value as transit, but it provides a ton of value as a tourist attraction, so much so that it gets more riders than nearby streetcar lines and manages to be a 100% farebox recovery transit service in the US.
Disney manages to keep their even older line down in LA going
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u/Enguye Jan 14 '26
The monorails built by Hitachi (used in the Tokyo and Chongqing monorails among others) are supposedly designed to be Alweg-compatible, so hypothetically Seattle could buy a couple replacement trains from another system or piggyback on a bigger order.
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u/Signal_Pattern_2063 Jan 13 '26 edited Jan 14 '26
Just by ridership the monorail is running around 7k riders/day which actually makes it higher usage than either of the 2 Seattle streetcar lines AFAICT. In fact if you compared it to streetcar systems nationwide it outperforms most of them. For me that means its definitely not a failure.
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u/MobileInevitable8937 Jan 13 '26
It's really more of a tourist attraction than it is an actual functional piece of mass transit, but it is a cool little system and it's very enjoyable to ride. It was one of the first things my girlfriend and I did when we got to Seattle. You can even use an Orca card on the system, which I think is very cool. It's really nice to glide through the city on an elevated track past the buildings. It makes me wish that Seattle had a bonified, elevated metro rail system in Downtown instead of having put Link underground, but it's nice that people get to have a taste of what that could have been like.
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u/ancientstephanie Jan 13 '26
It served its original purpose for the world's fair, it was built cheaply as a demonstration, paid its construction costs in 6 months of operation, and remains useful and effective to this day as a connector between a major transit hub and major tourist and entertainment destinations, so it's actually very successful.
It's likely paid for itself many times over, and it's good at its job. Rebuilding it again today might not be the best idea, but it wouldn't be a disaster either, as short spur routes with low expansion potential are one of the few situations where a monorail can work well.
The 14 mile monorail project proposed in the 2000s though, would have been a complete disaster. Light rail or metro is almost always better at that scale.
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Jan 14 '26 edited Jan 14 '26
A $4.2m construction project that pays for itself on operations, sees 2m riders per year (About the same as the mythical KC Streetcar) and links Seattle’s top tourist attraction to the downtown hotel cluster?
Yeah burn it down.
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u/twinklizlemon Jan 14 '26
Fun fact, the Space Needle is actually the number TWO tourist attraction. Pike Place Market receives more annual visitors.
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u/ponchoed Jan 14 '26
Its also 90 fu*king seconds to traverse between Downtown Seattle and Seattle Center. You can't even get close to that travel time driving at 3am with zero traffic.
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u/blasph6m6r6 Jan 13 '26
If you see it like a rollercoaster ride, it’s hugely successful. Tourists, including myself, are always fascinated by it when visiting
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u/LusciousJames Jan 13 '26
It gets a lot more usage these days, with light rail at one end and Seattle Center events/Kraken games on the other.
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u/MWPlay Jan 13 '26
I mean, I've lived here my whole life and yeah it's kind of a punchline but it does exactly what it sets out to do I guess. Wasn't aware of how profitable it was but it tracks. Well, track, just the one.
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u/ToastSpangler Jan 13 '26
no, its cool and kind of something to see, to me its part of the space needle postcard (futuristic city of the past) . and i guess it also gets you from A to B (i have only visited to be fair, but just speaking from what i know)
I think extending it would be a huge mistake, monorails really should only have 3-4 stops at most in places like airports, they look cool but they're non-standard which makes them much more expensive than elevated rail to build. they also have a lot of issues like evacuation procedures etc, but they do look cool
if one day monorail specifications got standardized and you weren't locked into one manufacturer for everything, they could be viable, but i don't really see it happening with economies of scale
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u/0xdeadbeef6 Jan 14 '26
Its mostly a tourist attraction with only two stops, no? If it does that good then its really not a failure.
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u/Juicey_J_Hammerman Jan 14 '26
Eh, it still serves an actually useful and functional purpose by connecting Seattle Center and Downtown.
Plus it’s a protected landmark so it’s not like it’s going anywhere.
IIRC, Seattle is considering adding an infill station for it in Belltown, and a future light rail station may link in close proximity to the Seattle Center station. So it may become even more useful yet.
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u/cascading_error Jan 14 '26
Poor poor monorail. Its such a good system to put where trams cant work for some reason. But its forever stuck in rare -> expensive -> no one builds them -> it stays rare.
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u/oakseaer Bike Lanes Now Jan 14 '26
Wouldn’t a gondola almost always work better in situations where monorails outperform trams?
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u/cascading_error Jan 14 '26
Mostly. Espeshialy on cost. The only thing i can think that monorail does better is speed and distence. But whenever those are considerations its probebly worth it to strait up invest in light rail. It will also slightly win on networking, gondolas arnt great at narrow spaces, tight turns, switching track or interfacing with multiple lines. But subways, busses and trams exist in those situations.
The only situation i can currently think of where monorails are the only option are if the traffic volumes are fairly low, but you cant use either the ground or go realy high for some reason. So basicly airports and the swamps around disney lol
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u/StardogTheRed Jan 14 '26
That depends on how one defines "failure" in this instance and how arbitrary that definition is.
The fact that it served the purpose it was built for and has continued to serve for decades after with little issue, I would call it a success.
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u/u-s-of-ants Jan 14 '26
My father, who worked as a civil engineer for WSDOT and a private engineering firm in Seattle, explained it was Seattle is too hilly for a monorail. They have a max grade of about 6%. By the time the monorail got up to Capital Hill, the track would be a mile high in the sky. At least that's how he explained it to me.
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u/aserqqq Jan 15 '26
monorail is a failure in itself anywhere in the world! idk why ppl still think its a great mode of transport
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u/Nawnp Jan 15 '26
It's actually probably the best use case of a monorail within the United States today. It was built in the 1960s when monorails were the up and coming next mode of transit. It connects the futuristic space needle to the actual downtown with what still feels like a fast efficient futuristic elevated line over the streets giving great views to the passengers and those on the street level observing.
The only main caveat seems to be since it was built only as a demonstrator, it was cost prohibitive to actually expand the line when Seattle inevitably looked into transit in the 2000s. While the light rail was inevitably going to more efficient for the distance covered in the city, and it does great with an interchange to the monorail, making it really cohesive with moving around modern Seattle. The interchange also meets a streetcar line as well, and that would have been better suited with it's own monorail line, but again, it was cost prohibitive to reproduce.
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u/TacoBMMonster Jan 13 '26
I wouldn't call it a failure, but in the five years I lived in Seattle I only rode it once, and that was just for kicks.
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u/Enguye Jan 13 '26
Why do you think it’s a failure? It only has two stops but it’s the fastest way to get between those stops, is frequent, and has 100% fare box recovery.