Zoo board considering floating train
$25M project, at no cost to taxpayers, would ferry guests above monorail
Toronto Zoo’s defunct passenger-bashing monorail could whir back to life as a high-tech “people mover” with visitors peering at animals while magnetically levitating over the old track.
The zoo board on Thursday will consider anew a 2016 proposal by Edmonton-based Magnovate Technologies to build, at no cost to the taxpayers, a $25-million driverless ride ferrying people around the zoo in cars floating above the monorail “guideway,” pushed by electromagnets.
Magnovate says approval to proceed would let it seek a mix of government and private investment to prove its technology is better and cheaper to build than “maglev” systems long used in parts of China and Ja- pan and now proposed for a northeast U.S. commuter line.
Most projects percolating internationally, for a technology that hasn’t yet fulfilled its space-age promise but is gaining ground in Asia, focus on speed. Backers of the U.S. proposal say travellers could blast from Baltimore to Washington, D.C. in only 15 minutes.
But the Toronto Zoo proposal would glide visitors past animal enclosures at a sedate 10 km/h, accelerating to no more than 30 km/h between five stops.
In its pitch to the zoo board, Magnovate says the ride itself would become a magnet for visitors “desirous of riding the first commercial maglev transit system on our continent.” Tickets could cost between $12 and $15 per ride. Magnovate and the zoo would split revenue under a 15-year agreement.
Zoo staff are recommending the board give the proposal a green light.
“It would be an enhancement from a guest experience” says Jennifer Tracey, the zoo’s senior director of marketing, communications and partnerships.
“Also it would run year-round and be climate-controlled where the current (open-air trackless trolley) Zoomobile runs from May to October and in May and October only on weekends.”
Dan Corns, Magnovate chief executive, says a previous funding pitch for the zoo project was well-received by Sustainable Development Technology Canada but a new application with a firm expression of interest from the zoo board will have a better shot.
The project would show investors and potential clients that Magnovate technology, with cars carrying 10 to 15 passengers running independently or in clusters, darting into a station on demand while the rest of the cluster keeps moving, is viable for bigger urban commuter uses, Corns says.
The vehicles and track would be less heavy than those with traditional connected maglev trains, he said, and costs can be kept down at the zoo because the monorail track can be adapted.
Proponents are hoping the new system, if built, will have a happier run than the Toronto Zoo monorail, which ran from 1976 to1994 and cost $14 million to build.
While lauded as a futuristic way to comfortably view other- wise inaccessible parts of park, the “Domain Ride” had a 1991 crash between trains that injured nine people.
Three years later, a train leaving a station lost power on a steep hill and rolled backward into another train, sending 37 people to hospital with various injuries.
“It was like warp speed backwards,” the 22-year-old train operator told the Star at the time. It never reopened.