>>1225235>>1225243>>1225245>>1225262Monorails have a short list of benefits over conventional rail, and a slightly more important list of problems.
On the benefit side, monorails come with all the mechanical advantages of rubber-tired traction. Monorails can handle much steeper slopes, and can create much faster acceleration than steel-on-steel wheels. When safety features like walkways are removed, a monorail's design and construction is relatively simple, being mostly pre-cast, pre-stressed concrete segments which would benefit from economies of scale.
The costs are obvious, though. You can't run it at grade if you want to cross roads, you would be locked in to a single manufacturer for all repairs and reconstruction, the small size of the starting system would increase costs even further.
So the only places for an effective monorail system, as opposed to conventional subways, would be a mountainous/hilly region (L.A.) that demanded high acceleration between short station distances (L.A.), preferably privately owned or in a low-regulatory environment (L.A. in the 50s/ALWEG), that was willing to pay for a whole system right off the bat instead of piecemeal "maybe here, maybe there" planning (L.A. in the 50s), and where the operations and manufacture were under one roof (ALWEG).
Also Chongqing falls under all these categories too.
