Wake up, monorail dreamers

When do you give up on a dream?

If I were Dick Falkenbury, I might have given up way back in 1994. That's when the cab driver held the first meeting on his idea to crisscross the city with monorail lines. Only one person showed up. But that's the thing about dreamers. They're incorrigible.

Falkenbury refused to go away. He took to the streets, alone, to wave a sign. He drew his famed X-shaped monorail map on a piece of plywood. He held more meetings, and the numbers grew — a dozen people came, then two dozen.

It's the endearing true story of the monorail movement. Born from the dream of an ordinary citizen and embraced by the people, the establishment be damned.

Now it's 11 years later. The monorail project is in tatters. Tuesday, voters overwhelmingly said "no thanks" to bringing Falkenbury, 52, back on the monorail board to try to rescue the 14-mile line.

So I asked him, since he started it all. When do you give up on a dream?

Never, he said.

"Even after this beating, I haven't given up on the monorail," he said. "The city needs rapid transit. That was true when we started all this, it's true today, and it will be true if the monorail is killed.

"Where would we be if dreamers gave up, if everyone with an idea or an innovation just folded at the first sign of adversity?"

There's truth to that. Cities would wither without dreamers. This was brought home to me the other night at a retirement celebration for David Brewster, founder of Seattle's Town Hall cultural arts center.

Brewster had long dreamed of creating a civic gathering place. Speakers described how he never let naysayers or pragmatic issues, like having a solid business plan, get in his way.

Now Town Hall hosts 400 events a year, from symphony performances, to speeches, to veterans debating the Iraq war. It has become the city's third place, thanks to a dreamer.

Cities have to dare to dream. In that spirit, I'm with Falkenbury — it's too soon to give up on the monorail. Mayor Greg Nickels and the City Council ought to give the monorail agency the rest of the year to work out a way to build it.

The agency can't be dissolved until January anyway, when the Legislature convenes, so what's the harm?

That said, the monorail may owe its existence to dreamers, but it's the dreamers who are now derailing it.

The mayor is absolutely correct when he says the agency doesn't have enough money. The choices are clear: Drastically shorten and simplify the line, or raise taxes. Either would require voter approval.

Yet some monorail backers persist that all 14 miles can be built without going back to the voters. Now that is dreaming.

Someone once said that reality can be defeated with enough imagination. Nice thought, but that person obviously wasn't trying to build a $1.6 billion mass-transit line through the heart of a major city.

Falkenbury electrified Seattle with his monorail dream. But more imagination isn't what this project needs now.

It needs the dreamers running it to wake up.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.