WARNING: This is Version 1 of my old archive, so Photos will NOT work and many links will NOT work. But you can find articles by searching on the Titles. There is a lot of information in this archive. Use the SEARCH BAR at the top right. Prior to December 2012; I was a pro-Christian type of Conservative. I was unaware of the mass of Jewish lies in history, especially the lies regarding WW2 and Hitler. So in here you will find pro-Jewish and pro-Israel material. I was definitely WRONG about the Boeremag and Janusz Walus. They were for real.
Original Post Date: 2007-05-29 Time: 00:00:00 Posted By: Jan
[This excellent analysis of this idea shows how silly it really is.
Real and serious businesses are not investing in this country so in step the shysters and clowns. Do these people know what they’re doing?
As far as I can guess, the “trick” Barba Gaoganediwe refers to is probably – more likely an appropriate back-hand payment from the “businessmen”.
The idea of a monorail between Soweto and Johannesburg is patently ridiculous. (I see the Minister of Transport – after the eNATIS chaos is now saying something sane by saying this idea is not approved within larger plans laid down earlier).
Firstly they have to build all these elevated railway lines and railway stations. I am curious as hell to see how they will get this elevated railway line into Johannesburg’s CBD given that the M1 highway is also elevated over the buildings and currently the trains from Soweto run underneath the highway. Where will the monorail run?
Secondly, as you know people have been thrown off trains from Soweto before. So what now? People will have further to fall when chucked off a train? Will people now be falling from the sky down on to other people??
Thirdly, a monorail strikes me as something of a gimmick and not as something that is really rugged. In Africa things need to be RUGGED! How good is the safety of this thing? Can it be easily sabotaged or damaged or worse still… derailed?
What this country needs is NOT a GauTrain or this monorail. This country had an excellent railway system – the finest in Africa. What this country needs is to look at the American railway system. Some time ago I read up about it. The American railway system is the most efficient in the world from an engineering point of view. It has nice width, and the rail lines also have the nicest gradients. Thus from an engineering point of view, moving a ton of goods in America by rail requires the least amount of energy of any other means of land transport. And, the American rail system is the most energy efficient rail system in the world! EFFICIENCY – American-style – is what we need in our rail system so that we can transport goods and people. This country is largely flat and well-suited to rail. Developing the South African railways should be a major priority for this country. We don’t need stupid gimmicks. We need solid railways lines which are efficient and which can help to get some of the heavy trucks off of our highways where they are wearing out our roads.
Railway is the most energy-efficient (and therefore cost-efficient) means of transporting goods on land ever invented – and that’s what we should be focussing on.
But, let me remind you that in the early days of ANC rule, the ANC was shutting down railway lines all over the show. The ANC actually messed around a lot with the excellent rail infrastructure we had.
Now we have clowns trying to build something up. But we don’t need 1001 different types of railway lines which can’t integrate. A silly railway line around Gauteng or an even sillier one between Johannesburg and Soweto won’t solve anything. We need proper railway lines which can run country-wide and which can reduce the cost of moving goods and people. But the ANC stuffed up the railways and the blacks have been burning the passenger trains.
I wonder how long it will be before the blacks set fire to their first Monorail train?
Also… there are other questions about how these people will build the Monorail for “free” (for R12 billion) while “making money from the stations”. Either these guys are complete fools, or they know something you and I don’t. My tendency is to think that this business group are probably fools who will lose their money. Or there are some interesting back-handers that have been paid to people… Jan]
The proposed monorail between Soweto and Johannesburg CBD, planned to solve the city’s transport problems by transporting 1,5 million commuters a day, cannot possibly work.
Basic calculations show that in order to meet this demand the system would need 6 000 carriages to depart from Soweto in a three-hour period to move the proposed passenger load on the rail system.
The Gauteng Economic Development Agency last week (CR) announced that a R12-billion, 44km monorail will constructed from Protea in Soweto to Bree Street in town; and will be built, financed and operated by a little-known Malaysian consortium.
Tim Sargeant says few monorail systems in the world carry more than 100,000 passengers per day – yet the Johannesburg one plans to convey 15 times that, far outstripping the longest functioning monorail route in the world: a 23km monorail in Osaka, Japan.
According to Tim Sargeant, Democratic Alliance spokesperson on the environment, basic research shows that the proposed 1,5 million passengers per day means 750 000 each way.
Assuming, he said, that 80 percent of these would want to travel in the early morning and late afternoon rush hours, there would be about 600 000 people trying to travel in an approximate three-hour period each way.
At 100 people per carriage, 6 000 carriages would be required to leave Soweto in a three-hour morning period – equating to 2 000 carriages departing each hour or about 33 per minute.
“Loading 100 passengers every two seconds for a period of three hours would represent an unparallelled, record-shattering achievement. Disgorging 600 000 people into the Johannesburg CBD at the rate of 50 people per second would also raise some interesting logistical issues there,” he said.
“The chances of such a preposterously unrealistic system being approved, constructed and implemented by September 2009 are precisely nil,” he said.
Gauteng Economic Development Agency spokesperson Barba Gaoganediwe said the monorail would succeed, with “the trick” being in the frequency of trips and large number of stations.
“The rail will have a number of switches to allow carriages to pass one another at great frequencies. If you consider how many passengers the 14-seat taxi carries each day through high volumes of traffic and frequent stops to and from Soweto many times a day, this can be possible because the rail moves quickly in both directions without people having to wait for the train to come back.
The prophets of doom should focus their energy on making this system work instead of criticising it,” he said.
Get the full story in the May 22 print edition or online version of The Star.
Source: Independent Online (IOL)
URL: http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click…/p>