Seattle Council Can’t Ignore Monorail Proposal Officials Didn’t Take Idea Seriously, But Voters Did

The plans for the world’s largest monorail system were drawn up on a kitchen table by a bus driver and an unpublished poet. There was no price tag and there were few specifics. City Council members just laughed it off.

They’re not laughing anymore.

The proposal passed with 52.6 percent of the vote in November, and this time city leaders can’t afford to ignore it. Under a “no play, no pay” clause, if City Council members can’t come up with a way to pay for the monorail, their $73,000-a-year salaries will be withheld.

“We were such a sideshow,” recalled tour bus operator, cab driver and part-time transit planner Dick Falkenbury. Referring to monorail manufacturers, suppliers and potential financial backers, he said: “I don’t think they saw us coming. I mean, we pretty much blindsided them.”

For five years, Falkenbury, 45, had promoted the plan. About two years ago, Grant Cogswell, a 30-year-old unpublished poet who works as a tavern doorman, joined the cause, and together they collected the more than 18,000 signatures required to get it on the ballot.

They had no mass-transit expertise, no corporate backing, no slick public relations campaign. Just them, lugging around 6-by-3-foot pieces of plywood with maps showing how Seattle’s current two-stop downtown monorail system could be expanded into a huge X covering the city, with 29 stations along 40 miles of elevated track.

If built as planned, Seattle’s monorail would be the biggest in the world. The largest now extends 17 miles in Lille, France, and is being expanded to 27 miles by 2000.

Falkenbury said the first new leg of the monorail - a one-mile extension from the downtown station to the Kingdome - could be completed in months, and the whole system could be ready in as little as five years.

But business, government and transportation officials question the route structure, cost and financing.

Even Nick Licata, elected to the council as one of the few office-seekers who publicly supported the measure, said he doubts Falkenbury’s maps can be translated into pylons, guideways, and stations for less than double the $1 billion that backers say would be required to do the job.

“I think people were voting for the concept,” said newly elected Mayor Paul Schell. “I don’t think people were voting for the specifics of the plan.”

Since the mid-1960s, monorails have been studied for use in and around Seattle and repeatedly have been rejected, largely because of estimates that they would cost twice as much to build as street-level rail lines, said Bob White, executive director of the regional transit system.

But Falkenbury expects to be there to make sure his plan doesn’t get short shrift. He is in line to be appointed to the 12-member board of the new Elevated Transportation Co.