Easy Rider : ‘Floating’ Train Labeled as Cure for Traffic Blues

By the year 2000, Orange County commuters could be whisked from a major office and retail complex to a convention hall, then to a sports stadium on a pollution-free rail “people-mover” system that “floats” cars along a magnetic field on elevated tracks.

That is the futuristic vision unveiled by Board of Supervisors Chairman Harriett M. Wieder on Monday in Santa Ana. Wieder invited officials from Los Angeles and Orange counties to watch a 60-minute slide show and video and hear about a $60-million, 1.3-mile pilot system now under construction in downtown Las Vegas.

“This is right out of Buck Rogers,” said Wieder, who is running for the Republican nomination in the 42nd Congressional District. “But we have to find alternatives to the automobile so that we can take care of traffic and our air quality, and this may be it.”

Inexpensive Operation

Vehicles in the Las Vegas people mover are projected to carry as many as 116 people at speeds of 40 or 50 miles an hour between stations, using very little power--about 20 cents worth of electricity to move each car a mile.

The first link of the Las Vegas project, due for completion in 1991, will connect a sports and convention complex to a library, transportation center and retail project. A ticket for a one-way trip between any two points in the system is expected to cost about $1.50, compared to $2.90 for taxi fare. When finished by 1995, the entire $320-million, 10-mile system will also link the Las Vegas airport with major hotels.

Wieder said she will ask Caltrans, the Orange County Transportation Commission and the Orange County Transit District to study the feasibility of building similar “people movers” on the planned San Joaquin Hills tollway and other new highways.

Generally, the so-called people-mover plan was received favorably, with some transportation experts enthusiastic over the concept. Others, however, were skeptical that Orange County commuters could be dislodged from their cars.

“We will still see the automobile be the primary vehicle of choice in Southern California for decades to come,” Stanley T. Oftelie, executive director of the Orange County Transportation Commission, told the briefing group, which met in Santa Ana.

“(But) I think we can move ahead and provide attractive alternatives if we can package them attractively and intriguingly as Las Vegas has attempted to package them,” Oftelie said, referring to artists’ renderings showing future Las Vegas residents clad in spage-age garb, standing on futuristic transport platforms reminiscent of the spaceport at Disneyland.

‘Right on Target’

“These are new technologies that we have to look at to solve our problems,” said Don R. Griffin, president of the Southern California Assn. of Governments (SCAG), the regional planning agency. Griffin, a Buena Park councilman, told Wieder: “Your idea that the automobile isn’t going to do the job is right on target. The more we bring people in Southern California together to look at these opportunities and techniques, the better.”

Anaheim City Councilman Irv Pickler said he and his City Council colleagues have been interested in the people-mover concept for some time and will examine the elevated magnetic system for possible use in the area around the Anaheim Convention Center, Disneyland and Anaheim Stadium.

Pickler added that he was surprised to hear during Monday’s briefing that it took Las Vegas only four years to go from the planning stage to construction.

The people-mover concept is a simple one. Magnets mounted underneath the cars are repelled by a traveling magnetic field in the rails embedded in a steel or concrete guideway. The traveling magnetic field also pulls the vehicles along the guideway. Small rollers guide the cars. No wheels touch the rails, virtually eliminating the resistance of friction.

Also, the Las Vegas trains are to be totally automated and controlled by computers, with no crews on board. The front and back ends of each car fold down like gull wings in emergencies, allowing passengers to walk down into the solid-floored crevice between the two rails.

“I think one of the unique things about this is the quietness of the system,” said Keith McKean, director of Caltrans’ Orange County district.

But McKean and others expressed doubt that running transit lines along existing or planned freeway routes was the best use for such novel systems.

“The freeways carry motor vehicles . . . they are not really traffic generators (origination points and destination points) per se,” McKean said. “I think you really need to look at how you connect the (origination points and destinations) the best way you can. And that can be most any place, not necessarily the freeways.”

Oftelie agreed, saying that such people-mover systems must be built to serve specific points of origin and destination, rather than attempt to substitute for freeway travel generally.

That is because, he said, commuters are scattered all over and don’t live in pockets dense enough to justify construction of enough transit stations to ensure that there would be one close enough to most people’s homes.

In 1984, Orange County voters overwhelmingly rejected a proposed 1-cent sales tax that would have raised money for roads and a light-rail system linking Fullerton with John Wayne Airport via stops in Anaheim, Santa Ana and Costa Mesa.

Jim Gosnell, a transportation planner at SCAG, said the private funding aspect of the Las Vegas project and the new technology involve “new opportunities that we should explore.”

L.A. Proposal Killed

Gosnell recalled that a major people-mover project designed for downtown Los Angeles was killed because of the lack of federal funds in the early 1980s.

“The idea of a large public-private rail system agreement makes sense,” Oftelie said after the meeting.

“But it seems to me that the Las Vegas system gives a lot of development rights to the system operator. . . . I’m not sure that there are many places in Orange County that can stand Las Vegas’ densities. The one area that would seem possible is the area around Disneyland and the convention center in Anaheim, but we heard the man from Las Vegas say that Las Vegas residents opposed a system geared to serving tourists. You’d have the same problem facing you in Anaheim.”

Gosnell said a people-mover system would probably work best in Anaheim or possibly Santa Ana, downtown Los Angeles, Pasadena and Long Beach, with service along the coast into Orange County beach areas.

“The system has to serve areas of high activity,” within a city, or link several cities together, Gosnell said.

The briefing, in the Board of Supervisors’ conference room in the Hall of Administration, was conducted by Tom Graham, Las Vegas director of design and development, and Bernard Schatz of Magnetic Transit of America, which is 80% owned by AEG, a German electronics and engineering firm. AEG has designed and built a prototype test system in Braunschweig, West Germany, and is building the first commercial system in West Berlin.

Graham said he is excited about the Las Vegas people-mover project because it promises to attract new business and tourism while serving city residents at the same time.

“We’ve come a long way since 1973 when we burrowed ourselves into a hole,” Graham said. “We had an earlier plan that went down in flames because it would have served only tourists, and the community could not see what it was going to get out of it.”

Graham was referring to an earlier, ill-fated plan for a rail system linking the Las Vegas airport and the major hotel-casinos.

Graham said financing the system without taxpayers’ money was key to the entire project in Las Vegas. He said the city never developed its own ridership projections, because city officials wanted the builder-operator of the rail system to worry about it instead. As a result, the city has a 55-year contract with Las Vegas People Mover Associates, a consortium led by Magnetic Transit, in which the consortium is obligated to operate the system and maintain it, with the city responsible only for providing the right of way.

So far, Graham said, the project has cost taxpayers about $300,000, some of which came from federal grants.

Magnetic Transit has posted surety bonds to cover the cost of removing the elevated guideways in the event it should walk away from the project for financial reasons.

Profit is expected to come from advertising and concessions in the four people-mover stations; the system is expected to carry 4,000 to 8,000 people per hour in each direction.

Separately, Magnetic Transit and Las Vegas officials have been promoting a proposed high-speed, magnetically levitated train between Las Vegas and Southern California, with a station possibly located in Anaheim. A two-state commission is being formed to evaluate the high-speed train proposal.

Las Vegas Magnetic People-Mover

The futuristic Las Vegas people-mover system was described to officials from Orange and Los Angeles Counties. The system, scheduled to become operational in 1991, “floats” trains on a magnetic field over elevated tracks. Permanent magnets in the undercarriage support the cars about 1 inch above the track. A traveling electromagnetic field, developed in the coils built into the track, propels trains along the guideway. There are no motors, axles, wheels or heavy electrical or mechanical equipment. Cars are lighter than conventional systems and produce less noise, vibration and pollution. Operation is automatic, no drivers.

Source: Magnetic Transit of America, Inc.