wild01ride
Well-Known Member
Originally posted by 10 min. to wdw
well I think I've heard monorails have 100 tires each, the tires wear out i'm thats a expensive bill. WDW has 12 monorails imagine getting a bill for 1200 tires! comparitively speaking a 6 busses (6 busses has a carrying capacity greater then 1 monorail) has 36 tires on all 6 busses and I'm guessing a monorail tire is more expensive then the buss tires becuase they have to support the same weight and be much smaller. plus they proably take longer to change considering there are a few between the track and the floor of the monorail.
there are the A/C units to maintain. both of those are expensive plus you still get a huge electric bill every month for them.
OK, first of all- you gotta lay off the sauce a little when writing- I think I started to twitch trying to figure out the sense of some of this word order :hammer: :lol:
Second, I'm not familiar with the exact capacity figures, but if you are saying the monorails have 100 tires each, I KNOW that the tires/person figure is much higher for the monorail than the busses -in other words, the busses generally have six load-bearing tires per bus- two in the front and a "duallie"/two-wheel setup for the drive axle (for some reason, the number 50 something comes to mind for capacity per bus??). If you compare just the tire figures to that of the monorail, you would have more than sixteen busses worth of people on the monorail to equal the same number of tires. If you are claiming that the tires bear the same weight, that would mean that the 100 tires on the monorail were carrying the capacity of more than 16 busses (100 tires/6 tires per bus>16 busses) You claim however that the monorail holds less capacity than six busses, so obviously, it is not indeed supporting the weight of a full 16 busses.
Additionally, I know that in most commercial transit industries, the cost for bus/truck size tires is astronomical. Most tractor trailers use re-treads whenever possible because new truck tires are not feasible to buy at the rate that they need to be repalced. A truck tire can cost upwards of $500 easily. Beyond this, a truck tire experiences a substantial amount of lateral load (it has to grip in the sideways direction, which is prependicular to the way the tire turns.) The monorail, on the other hand, operates without turning corners and implements tires that run horizontally to bear load while taking a curve, so no matter what, the tires are experiencing the majority of their load normal to the track surface.
After the financial and mechanical integrity analysis of the tires is said and done, I think that the primary cost difference would be in the fact that the monorail, powered by high-current electric motors, employs a much less traditional and hence, much more costly to maintain and overhaul, drive system than the dime-a-dozen busses which exist in every corner of the world.
Bottom line- the monorails are a much more novel but less practical means of mass, schedulable, on-demand transportation and the busses are much easier to maintain and exchange on short notice.