Monorail foes decry "wall"

The Downtown Seattle Association has produced new images for Seattle's proposed monorail that depict a larger-than-expected wall of rails down the middle of Second Avenue.

The business group, which opposed monorail construction last fall, intends to use the renderings in talks with City Council members, who have final say over the monorail's construction permits.

The images, by LMN Architects, are based on engineering drawings the Seattle Monorail Project (SMP) released June 20 — the first time accurate dimensions became publicly available. Plans include concrete tracks at different heights downtown, emergency-escape walkways and concrete supports up to 5 ½ feet wide.

The monorail's lead contractor, Fluor Enterprises, disputed the accuracy of the Downtown Seattle Association (DSA) images and said its Cascadia Monorail team will release its own streetscape pictures later this week.

"The whole appearance, it's not what we expect it to look like," said spokesman Jerry Schneider. The DSA didn't show new landscaping, didn't depict rounded edges on several structures, and showed more steel bracing than needed in the escape walkways, he said.

Once a contract is signed, Cascadia will refine the looks in cooperation with Seattle architects and neighborhoods, he said.

The DSA says its drawings are based on real contract proposals that prove the new monorail will be bulkier than the one-mile line built for the 1962 World's Fair. Since the 2002 campaign, when voters approved the 14-mile Ballard-to-West Seattle line, downtown groups have worried whether the SMP could keep its promises of a sleek design.

"We've worked real hard to make downtown a pedestrian-friendly place. We've always wondered how this would work in the urban fabric, and we've never gotten an accurate response," said Steve Koehler, co-chairman of the DSA's monorail task force.

Design issues recently have been overshadowed by debate over a now-discarded finance plan that would have collected more than $11 billion in taxes over 50 years to pay for a $2.1 billion line.

Monorail-board member Cindi Laws said, "The bottom line is, DSA is one of the few formal organizations that supported the recall last year." (DSA did not take a formal position on Initiative 83, the "monorail recall," but did issue a statement Sept. 28, 2004, opposing monorail construction.)

SMP and Cascadia have attempted to reduce the bulk of the structures.

Support columns would be 100 feet or more apart, compared to 80 feet for the current monorail, so fewer are needed. The basic column width of 4 feet, 9 inches by 4 feet is bigger than the 3 feet depicted on 2002 pro-monorail literature but trimmer than the 5 feet-plus that the SMP acknowledged as possible a year ago.

Why so large?

Monorail planners have looked for a way to avoid huge stations that would loom over an entire intersection, blocking north-south views including of the Space Needle. "People were sort of aghast looking up Second Avenue and Fifth Avenue, to have a station that sprawls over the streets," recalls SMP board member Richard Stevenson.

So SMP chose smaller stops off to the side, where southbound passengers would board from the middle floor, and northbound passengers from the top floor. The monorail's lead designer invented the "iris" concept — like two stalks of the flower, support posts would hold the tracks separately at two levels. Stevenson said he believes the iris design is a good decision.

Jud Marquardt is a founding partner of LMN and an early monorail opponent. With the iris, each railway beam needs its own escape walkway, adding clutter, he said.

"Team Monorail," a group that hoped to bid on the project using lighter-weight trains, would have built irises on only one block.

Kim Pedersen, president of The Monorail Society, wrote an essay encouraging SMP to build its tracks with a simpler design.

"While I certainly don't want to give the anti-monorail zealots any fuel, I feel strongly enough to voice my concern about this type of structure," Pedersen wrote. "Perhaps calling this an 'elevated Berlin Wall' is extreme, but in my opinion this kind of track is not a good idea. No other monorail in the world has irises like this, and I don't believe Seattle needs them."

Mike Lindblom: 206-515-5631 or mlindblom@seattletimes.com