An Idea That Won't Float

Smack in the middle of the Bay State’s best-known thoroughfare—cars whizzing past on both sides, their drivers tossing cigarette butts and empty Pringles cans out their open windows—is one of the sad neglected spaces that permeate America’s highways: the median of the Pike. The meager, desolate territory may be known to few and loved by none—but if one turnpike administrator has his way, all that could change.

For Massachusetts Turnpike Authority Chair Matthew J. Amorello, the sun might soon rise over a new kind of median, a median defined not by Jersey barriers or Jersey-esque patches of exhaust-wilted grass, but by a sleek, superfast monorail propelled from Springfield to Boston by powerful electromagnets. Commuters would still commute on either side in the familiar car lanes, but they would be the main event no longer—the median’s proud iron steed would have stolen their thunder. A high-tech, vaguely Blade Runner-flavored cream center would have at last filled the transportational Twinkie that is the Pike.

Today, this is a dream: an expensive and far-fetched twinkle in the eye of the Pike’s highest don. For such a dream, devoting $10,000 for an exploratory study must have seemed cheap to Amorello. The pharaohs had their pyramids; Mitterand, his Chunnel. Amorello might have his magnetically-levitated monorail. As chair, Amorello took over the Big Dig in February 2002, and for nearly two years the rest of the transportation world have looked on with a combination of envy and schadenfreude. But a man of Amorello’s imagination is no more satisfied with that gargantuan project than Caesar was with two-thirds of Gaul. And so he has commissioned an study—the first stop on the long ride to monorail creation.

There is much to admire in Amorello’s Quixotic fancy. Countless men and women drive down the Pike every day, scarcely glancing at the humble spit that separates them from their mirror-image twins making the same journey in reverse. Amorello looked at that same sight and saw what no other could: prime real estate. One man, one vision, one rail—gravity’s just bringing us down, baby.

Then again, there’s just as much to doubt. As marvelous as Amorello’s dream seems on paper, it is hard to imagine justifying the enormous expenditure needed to bring such an eighth wonder to this world. Single-serving Learjets for each commuter would be cool, too, but they’re just not a feasible way to address Massachusetts’ rush-hour crunch. As cleverly right-under-our-noses a location as the Pike’s median may seem, it is hardly ideal in practical terms—a magnetic express along the same route as the existing highway would be of little use without branches connecting to suburban communities, and those branches would take yet more land and money. Even worse, the Pike delays that would be necessary for the monorail’s construction would be devastating—just ask commuters on the Van Wyck Expressway in Queens, who suffered for years during the construction of an “AirTrain” to John F. Kennedy International Airport. (Kennedy ’40 was a former Crimson Executive.) And hasn’t Amorello ever seen the cautionary episode of “The Simpsons” where a huckster and his monorail nearly destroy Springfield?

The more one thinks of the fantastic monorail, the more it comes to seem like one of those grand delusions, so appealing in the wee hours of the metaphoric night, that deflate as soon as morning comes. Better leave the monorail to haunt our dreams—and Amorello’s—than to let a bureaucratic nightmare kill it with the cruelties of reality. The breathtakingly-beautiful vision isn’t meant for this world.