Overview
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OVERVIEW

High speed, clean, visually pleasant transport for both commuter and tourist is key to maintaining San Diego's unique ambiance with its growing neighborhood and core city population, and its many widespread entertainment venues. The city must move into a twenty-first-century transportation system to ensure that commuting obsolescence doesn't inhibit availability.

The original very successful San Diego Trolley was able to utilize to a large degree rights-of way pre-existing from prior years transportation corridors. But as extensions are needed, freeways and hostile terrain have made costs for light-rail of questionable recovery. Furthermore, light rail construction heavily impacts areas through which it is routed, and when completed, has a deleterious effect on intersecting pedestrian walks, vehicle traffic and business traffic on any crossed or shared surface street.

Trolley transport was in use before the start of the 20th century. Autos and bus transport started soon after the 20th century began. San Diego morning commuters in bus or auto might often wonder if 1920 travel even from North Park to downtown was any slower. Monorail systems provide the planning flexibility to provide fast, safe and enjoyable services to areas that cannot be reasonably accessed by light rail or that are negatively impacted by bus-rapid-transit dedicated routes.

Electrically powered, rubber tire monorails are the quietest, most environmentally friendly of transportation alternatives and have a small footprint on the surface below. These characteristics make them the prime choice for transport over environmentally sensitive areas otherwise not suitable for freeways or light rail when further expansion beyond routes proposed here are necessitated. They also are more people-friendly in residential areas through which they are routed.

A sequence of progressive segment-by-segment funding, development and proving of the system based upon a compendium of present traffic and growth projections is proposed and defined in this plan. The map shows a possible comprehensive long-term system suitable for monorail application that connects key areas of the city into a high speed twenty-first-century transportation network not inhibited by existing structures or geographical features. Each segment is separately further defined.

updated:  4-4-2005

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