Nashville, Tennessee, can be incredibly congested, with cars, at times. And in a desperate bid to relieve that congestion, the Tennessee Senate just voted 31-0 to study the feasibility of building a monorail to transport people to and fro. And if it worked for Ogdenville and Brockway, it might just work for Nashville.
"But why build one of them fancy-shmancy monorails (MONORAIL!), with their one rail, which has only worked at Disney and in Seattle and kinda-sorta-but-not-really in Las Vegas," you ask. "Surely a normal, wholesome, God-fearing railroad with two proper rails is as good for Nashville as it is for the rest of America?"
And those are some good, tough, hard-hitting questions, that I just made you ask, of the Tennessee Senate.
The crux of the matter is Interstate 24, which nominally runs from the northern tip of Georgia up to Illinois. But if you look at it on a map, poor old Nashville sits smack dab in the middle:
That makes it not only a major commuting thoroughfare for the Nashville metropolitan area (population 1,589,934!), but also a major transit corridor for the southeast United States in general.
Which makes people scream all kinds of obscenities, as they're trying to get to work.
The general idea behind the Nashville monorail (MONORAIL!) would be to build it actually inside the median of I-24, and because the median of an interstate built in the 1960s wasn't constructed with the thought of a railroad in mind (seriously, look how narrow it is), the obvious solution is to build a railway that's a lot narrower than normal.
Thus, a MONORAIL (MONORAIL!).
State Senator Bill Ketron (R-Murfreesboro), the guy who proposed the plan, pegged the price at around a billion dollars, probably because round numbers sound nice. And Ketron plans to fund up to 90% of that with federal dollars, because Big Government is only the devil encroaching onto the lives of defenseless Americans until you can get them to pay for your monorail (MONORAIL!).
Plus, I'm sure all that construction going all along the median of I-24 won't add to the traffic problem, at all, during the years and years it'll take to possibly, actually build this thing.
But after this study, maybe Nashville will find that this whole thing is maybe more of a Shelbyville idea.
MONORAIL!
via Wired Autopia