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Saturday, July 09, 2005

Leading structural engineer's comments on monorail plan

Just watching a broadcast of another of last week's public hearings on the monorail plan. There were more "pro" people than at the one I attended on Tuesday. However, most of the supporters are not very analytical. Typical comments are on the order of "let's just build it," "we need to do something," "this financing plan is good enough to get started" and "I realize the money thing didn't work out the way we were hoping, but . . . ."

I am more interested in the comments of Jon Magnusson, who modestly identified himself as a local structural engineer. He did not mention that he is CEO of one of the world's leading structural engineering firms, Magnusson Klemencic Associates. Mostly under its former name, Skilling Ward et al., this firm "engineered an incredibly diverse range of projects, from exposed wood structures, to 107-story buildings" (per their website--I'll leave it to the reader to guess which 107-story buildings those might have been). So this is a serious guy. He and his firm have no financial interest in the monorail project.

He notes that under the current plan only the Green Line will run through downtown, but other lines will feed into that. He says that as a matter of math, the capacity of the Green Line is too low by a factor of four to support passenger loads of the whole system, and that as planned the Green Line is not expandable. He concludes "If we build this our children will hate us."


posted at 2:58 PM

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