Mass Transit Ideas From the Man on the Street

Call them inventors, even visionaries.

But since the news broke last summer that Orange County cities were considering building a monorail or light-rail system to relieve traffic congestion, some interesting folks have been popping up to propose systems of their own design.

Take Bud Parriott of Orange, for example.

Parriott used to be known as Rocketman a few years ago when he worked as a technical publications coordinator at Rockwell International in Anaheim. Using his own money, he designed and built a large, radio-controlled, scale model of the Space Shuttle actually powered by a rocket engine.

Now a security guard in Tustin, Parriott uses his spare time to promote his own proposal for a monorail. It’s not just any white-bread monorail like the one at Disneyland, but one that uses vehicles to speed down freeway medians, non-stop. Passengers would catch up to the monorail by docking with it--using space technology--in a separate shuttle vehicle.

Parriott originally proposed this system, which he says could be built with modular, lightweight aerospace materials, in 1983. But he said he has revived it because of recent publicity surrounding monorails and high-speed trains.

“I’m hoping that this idea’s time has come,” Parriott said recently. “There’s no technical reason why this system won’t work.”

Parriott has dubbed his proposal “SCAT,” which stands for Southern California Area Transit. He even distributes brochures declaring that this is “An ‘E’ ticket to the future!”

Then there is G.W. Neil Stewart, president of Los Angeles-based Sopha Design & Development Inc. Stewart has proposed a monorail that would use freeways or river and flood-control channels and be combined with scenic, linear theme parks with landscaping and waterscaping. The elevated tracks could pass through parking structures that would double as passenger facilities.

“This is the answer to our traffic problems,” Stewart said recently. He even suggested that the federal government might be willing to have the Army Corps of Engineers help build the system, because the Corps built some of the existing flood-control channels.

“We must design for the future and solve the present situation immediately, not tomorrow, and it must be under one coordinated plan that meets all of our needs and not the politicians’, from a professional point of view,” Stewart wrote in a recent letter.

Not to be outdone, Alfred Hollander of Los Angeles has tried to interest transportation officials in his “Ecolog” proposal, which involves using trains or monorail vehicles to carry cars, like oceangoing ferries.

Such ideas, however novel, face a bureaucratic maze.

Brian Pearson, project development manager for the Orange County Transit District, explained that these proposals can get short shrift at agencies such as his because “we cannot consider any vehicle that has not been certified by the federal government. . . .

“We have no capability to do independent research on vehicle prototypes,” he said. “We tell people to go see UMTA (the Urban Mass Transit Assn.) or Caltrans, or someone who actually funds rail service. Unfortunately, many of these proposals are just sketchy ideas, and we have to deal with the real world.”

Caltrans occasionally sends unsolicited ideas to college research programs that it helps finance, but the researchers themselves say they are too busy with current projects or with seeking funds for their next one to deal much with outside ideas.

And the Orange County Transportation Commission refers people to a rail consultant, who also prefers to deal in vehicles that have a proven record of service somewhere else.