Is a Monorail for Santa Cruz Just Pie in the Sky?

Ed Porter has a dream.

The Santa Cruz councilman envisions his coastal town with a monorail system that would connect its two biggest draws: the beach and UC Santa Cruz.

The city has a population of about 55,000, but tens of thousands more cars hit Santa Cruz on some days -- mostly headed to the beaches or the university. The monorail, Porter believes, would help alleviate the gridlock that city officials have long been trying to end.

“So we have a world-class transportation system with only the economics of a small-sized city,” he said.

Porter has been pushing his monorail idea -- even getting help from a company that wants to build the rail system. But to many in the city, his effort is a quixotic one. Critics say that Santa Cruz is simply too small for such a mass-transit system and that it doesn’t have the money to build one.

A few weeks ago the City Council rejected Porter’s plan to study the idea.

“It’s untried and ahead of its time, and perhaps never going to be an adequate system,” said Vice Mayor Mike Rotkin. “Simply having a better bus system might be a good idea.”

Santa Cruz has been trying for years to figure out a way to handle its growing traffic congestion. When Porter came across SkyWeb Express, he thought his dream could become a reality and the city’s problems could be solved.

SkyWeb Express, developed by Taxi 2000 Corp. of Minnesota, is probably not what most people imagine a monorail system to be. Instead of large trains, it would use individual cars that looked like gondolas and could carry only three people.

Riders could swipe a prepaid card at a station, hop into an empty car and punch in a code for their destination. The computer-operated monorail would then take them there.

Porter said the system could transport 6,000 people an hour.

No SkyWeb monorails have been built, and the company was hoping Santa Cruz could be a model for other cities.

Jeral Poskey, the firm’s director of business development, said testing the personal rapid transit system would boost the city’s economy. For each mile of track built, 128 jobs would be created, Poskey said, and every time another city wanted to implement SkyWeb, all the engineering, planning and manufacturing would be based in Santa Cruz, creating more jobs.

Skeptics say the cost and the risks are too great in the current economy. Building a full SkyWeb monorail would cost the city an estimated $150 million. The company and its advocates, including Porter, maintain that the private sector could fund the building of the monorail and that investors would eventually get their money back.

“That’s a joke,” Vice Mayor Rotkin responded. “No public transit system is going to be funded by private investment.”

He said people would not take such a chance with their money without knowing whether they would ever get a return on their investment.

Rotkin said he would rather see additional lanes specifically for buses in Santa Cruz and more of what is called signal preemption. That system allows bus drivers to push a button to change a stoplight in their favor. The city already has two intersections equipped with the device, but there are no lanes designated for buses only.

Rotkin said Santa Cruz is not a large enough community to be the testing ground for the new monorail technology.

But Porter hasn’t given up hope. “It’s a new technology, and it’s innovative,” he said. “That’s the kind of obstacles that we’ll need to overcome.”