Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia has a monorail. I travelled on it recently, and so was wondering what the economic and geographical features of a city would need to be for a monorail to be a workable solution towards getting people around. In short, I was wondering, would a monorail work in Dublin?

I thought maybe a starting point would be looking at what the arguments are for monorails in general, and then look at the differences between cities that do have monorails, like KL and a city that doesn’t, Dublin. This is not a scientific review, and I am open to your comments at the end, even if it is that you just think it is a harebrained idea, or that a monorail would be too ugly for Dublin.

One of the main advantages of a monorail system is that they are usually cheaper than underground metro, as there is no need for tunnelling, and as they are up on stilts, they take less space away from existing traffic. This also means that they can be quicker to build. It may also be less expensive to run (in terms of annual cost) than heavy rail, metro or buses.

Despite what happened in the Simpsons episode (pictured) monorails are, according to some sources, the safest forms of mass transit, in particular when the measurement is number of KM travelled per passenger injury: in Disneyworld Florida there was a serious fire on board a monorail in the 1980s, a fatal crash between trains in 2009, where switching between lines was an issue, and a major accident in the Wuppertal Monorail in Germany in 1999, where a beam was left on the hanging track causing a carriage to drop into the river, but otherwise there is seem to have been very few accidents in over 100 years.

With our experience in Ireland of public projects taking more time and budget than planned, something that can be built quickly and relatively inexpensively might be an option, but would a monorail be tolerated in residential areas, where they might be travelling near homes? Monorails in Bankok and Kuala Lumpur travel on wider streets, but the Sydney Monorail, which used smaller carriages and was a single line loop did travel closer (sometimes through buildings), although in a docklands area rather than established residential streets.

Kuala Lumpur has a more decentralised city, with the “Central” Railway station some distance from other parts of the city. The monorail in KL loops around bigger streets linking neighbourhoods together and allows transfer to heavy rail/metro lines. Dublin, with it’s central shopping and business district stretching out into suburbs and villages does not have the same profile, and that’s probably why traditionally we had trams/buses all heading for “the pillar” and Connolly/Tara/Pearse being the busiest train stations.

Monorails can also deal with steeper gradients easily, as part of the gradient can be absorbed by having the elevated rails closer or further from the ground, as needed. Again, Dublin doesn’t have many of those types of gradient, although it might be an idea for Cork city centre, which does, particularly on the north bank.

Perhaps, if Dublin did have a monorail, it would link Phoenix Park Railway station with the actual Phoenix Park (given that buses can’t get in the gates on the North/West of the Park) then on to link Heuston Station with St. James’s Hospital, down Cork Street/ Kevin Street to Stephen’s Green, out to the Silicon docks, across to the IFSC, and then link with the DART and northern commuter line again at Clontarf Road Station. This would provide a semi-circle of connectivity which could work with the existing light and heavy rail and get people around quickly. It is however, just a crayons on a page type idea that would be unlikely to make it into any national plan.

Working on the existing heavy rail systems to increase capacity, adding some high volume underground metro lines where we have the population density (or the plan for it) and then improvements like Busconnects to make our existing buses more efficient are probably more cost-effective, and palatable for most. Some of us do like shiny things, but we can probably get away with visiting them when we go abroad!

You can also see the other cities worldwide who have monorails here: https://www.monorails.org/

Some thoughts comparing monorails with metro, light rail and other modes of mass transit are here (Source is Unitsky, from Belarus): https://ust.inc/news/less-costly-than-subway-tramway-and-monorail-how-the-ust-complex-can-solve-the-problems-of-satellite-cities?lang=en