5 Cities Join Forces on Monorail Plan

A proposal to build an 18-mile-long regional monorail line through the heart of Orange County gained momentum Thursday, as leaders of five central cities agreed to join together to push the futuristic commuter system.

Officials of the cities promised to work toward issuing a joint request early next year for proposals from private firms that might be willing to build and operate the system.

In exchange, the cities would provide the right of way for an elevated commuter line down their streets and help coordinate with local developers willing to build stations, which typically entail one-third the cost of such projects.

“I’m extremely excited and very hopeful that we’ll be able to pull together a consensus plan from these five cities to get this project off the ground,” said Santa Ana Mayor Dan Young. “I think it’s going to happen. It’s just plain going to happen.”

Aside from Young and other officials from Santa Ana, the meeting was attended by leaders from Irvine, Orange, Costa Mesa, Anaheim and several county transportation agencies.

The officials promised to assemble a team of staff members from the various cities as well as the county Transit District and Transportation Commission to draw up the request for proposals, which would go before the various city councils during the first quarter of 1990, Young said. In addition, a map of the route would be completed.

If each of the councils goes along with it, the request would then be issued to private monorail firms, a process that Young predicts will attract “international attention.”

Aside from asking each firm to detail how it would build and operate the system, the request would inquire about what public assistance is deemed necessary to push the project forward, Young said.

As now envisioned, a regional monorail network could link amenities such as Disneyland and Anaheim Stadium in the north with the MainPlace shopping mall and the civic center in Santa Ana, several large office developments, John Wayne Airport and the sprawling Irvine Spectrum office and industrial complex. An alternate line in Costa Mesa could run through the South Coast Plaza shopping mall.

The backbone of the system would be a single line featuring monorails capable of about 60 mph running along a raised rail stretching from Irvine in the south, through Costa Mesa, Santa Ana, Orange and terminating in Anaheim. Lower-speed monorail lines would branch off the main system to ferry passengers to locations to the east and west.

Young said he expects monorail firms will be eager to build a system, which would be the first commercially operating public monorail in the country, to “get a leg up on the other companies” in the worldwide competition to build such transportation lines.

Local developers, meanwhile, would reap benefits from building station stops in their new office buildings, including extra “density credits” to build more space in their projects and less stringent requirements to provide parking, Young predicted.

Some of the cities have already launched investigations into monorail systems, most notably Irvine, which hopes to reap $125 million in state rail-bond money that will be up for a vote in June.

Most of those efforts, however, have centered on developing lower-speed monorail systems to feed passengers to a central high-speed line that would run down the spine of the county.