RIP Ray Bradbury — and the FREE L.A. monorail that never was

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Los Angeles had a chance, back in 1963, to get some of these. For free.

The science fiction author Ray Bradbury is dead at 91. He was famous for books like "The Martian Chronicles" and "Fahrenheit 451." But he was also a Los Angeles resident who was dismayed at our life of increasingly neverending gridlock. 

Bradbury had a plan to do something about it. And it didn't involve subways or light rail. It involved monorails.

Free monorails.

Bradbury was quite enthusiastic about this. Here's what he reported in an L.A. Times op-ed from 2005:

More than 40 years ago, in 1963, I attended a meeting of the L.A. County Board of Supervisors at which the Alweg Monorail company outlined a plan to construct one or more monorails crossing L.A. north, south, east and west. The company said that if it were allowed to build the system, it would give the monorails to us for free —absolutely gratis. The company would operate the system and collect the fare revenues.

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