>>1985872I think you've got to set it in the mindset of the 1950s. You've got trains, sure, but they're mostly dirty steam or diesel locos, you've got the elevated train but it's not exactly clean or quiet, and you're being told they're all on the way out because the car is the way of the future. Historical metal-track monorails are mostly a historical curosity, so the idea seems new when someone comes along and shows you a shiny, clean looking monorail that runs on a big concrete beam. Technologically it's just a weird bus, but aesthetically it's a world apart.
Plus it's the 1950s-60s, it doesn't matter if you're selling bread, propeller planes, trains, or monorails, you're gonna hype it as the thing of the future, just like how in the 2020s if you're selling something you're going to try and give it vague political messaging. This was back when Cessna were promoting the suburb of the future where everyone'd park a plane in their garage, and some places like that even exist! But like the monorail or cities on the moon, things didn't play out like in the marketing material.
The monorail is just one of those ideas that was much stronger aesthetically than practically, like Concorde it continues to capture the imagination far out of proportion to how successful the concept has actually been, mainly because it looks cool.
