Seattle boasts a futuristic monorail system that was constructed for the 1962 World's Fair, heavily promoted as the absolute future of rapid, frictionless urban transit that would forever solve traffic congestion.

A closer look

Seattle boasts a futuristic monorail system that was constructed for the 1962 World's Fair, heavily promoted as the absolute future of rapid, frictionless urban transit that would forever solve traffic congestion. More than sixty years later, this brief, one-mile loop essentially functions as an overpriced, elevated theme park ride that exclusively shuttles confused tourists from a downtown shopping mall directly to the Space Needle. The grand vision of expanding the sleek monorail into a comprehensive, city-wide transit network was repeatedly crushed by endless political bickering, funding shortages, and the simple realization that elevated concrete tracks are aggressively ugly. In a brilliantly embarrassing moment in 2005, the city's only two functioning monorail trains managed to violently clip each other on a curve, suspending dozens of passengers above the street. It perfectly encapsulates the tragedy of retro-futurism, where the transport of tomorrow is stuck moving in circles today