I haven’t heard of Pittsburgh’s skybus actually! Thanks for sharing. This type of system with modern technology could be so powerful. I also think people don’t fully appreciate how expensive roads are to maintain, vs how cheap rail is.

It costs $1 million to repave a single lane mile of road, and they must be repaved every 15 years on average. There are 866 miles of paved road in Pittsburgh. That is 57 million dollars per year to maintain Pittsburgh’s roads, ignoring our 450+ bridges and assuming they are all single lane. Monorail has very little maintenance cost cause there is nothing to repave. Installation cost varies a ton but can be done for about $50 million per mile for elevated lines, including building the supporting power and control stations. After that upfront hurdle you see massive savings, cause roads last way longer when they see less traffic.

Wow, I've been on several of these people movers. They're fantastic. I'm so sad that this could also have been Pittsburgh's reality.

Skybus was gadgetban and a total boondoggle. If Port Authority had instead put its energy right off the bat towards the busways and streamlining the streetcar system into a comprehensive LRT system, then today we’d have one of the best transit systems pound for pound in North America.