Rick and Ray's excellent ride

Rick Caruso, re-inventor of the mall and aspirant to the office of mayor, has a big idea for Los Angeles - a monorail along Interstate 10 from downtown to Santa Monica. A monorail system, he recently told Businessweek magazine, could be built faster and cheaper than a "subway to the sea" - the current dream of those who advocate "big transit."Rick should have a talk with Ray . . . Ray Bradbury . . . who has been a vocal supporter of a monorail for Los Angeles at least since the early 1960s. Bradbury is dismissive of subways and their dark, unwholesome tunnels. "Remember," Bradbury wrote in Westways Magazine, "subways are for cold climes, snow and sleet in dead-winter London, Moscow, or Toronto. Monorails are for high, free, open-air spirits, for our always-fair weather."

Monorails were big ideas, once. They were highlights of Disneyland and the Seattle World's Fair. A bigger system was built at Disney World in Orlando. All three monorails are still running and very successfully.

Bradbury was in the audience in 1963 when the County Board of Supervisors rejected a proposal by the Alweg Monorail Company to build a $105 million system that would have eventually linked downtown by monorail to El Monte, Santa Monica, and Van Nuys. Sixten Holmquist, president of Alweg, promised a "turn key" construction project to be entirely financed by the builders and paid for by the Metropolitan Transit Authority from fare box revenues. Bradbury says he was thrown out of the Supervisors' meeting "for making impolite noises."

A monorail for L.A. was first proposed in 1910 (the propeller-driven car disintegrated during its first test.) A monorail down the Los Angeles River from the harbor has been proposed - and re-proposed - over the decades.

Ray needs no explanation for his futurism, but Rick may have stumbled into a cul-de-sac of the Los Angeles imagination. A monorail has always looked like something from tomorrow, but never like the future everyone wanted. Maybe the monorail was too Disney to be taken seriously. Maybe L.A. was already losing its faith in the kind of tomorrow a space-age public transit system implied.

"There's a great big beautiful tomorrow/Shining at the end of every day," the Sherman brothers wrote for Walt Disney's Carousel of Progress, not far from the Tomorrowland stop of the Disneyland monorail. "There's a great big beautiful tomorrow/And tomorrow's just a dream away."

Tomorrowland's optimism - Walt's optimism, really - was re-imagined into something else, something less, when Tomorrowland reopened in 1998. Now the theme is "the tomorrow that never was."

Rick's mayoral dream - and Ray's cranky fixation - may be headed in the same direction.

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