Toronto Zoo Board Plans to Build Maglev Train

The monorail destroyed by Toronto Zoo pbadengers could come back to life as a "high-tech smuggler," as visitors gazed at the animals while magnetically levitating on the old lane.

On Thursday, the zoo's board will review a 2016 proposal from Magnovate Technologies, based in Edmonton, to build a $ 25 million driverless ride at no cost to taxpayers, carrying people around the zoo in floating cars. above the "monorail guide corridor". electromagnets.

Mr. Magnovate said that his authorization would allow him to seek a combination of government and private investments to prove that his technology is better and cheaper to build than the "maglev" systems used for a long time in some parts of China and China. Japan and now proposed for a north-eastern suburban line of the United States.

Most of the hard-hitting international projects, for a technology that has not yet fulfilled its space-age promise but is gaining ground in Asia, are focused on speed. Proponents of the US proposal claim that travelers could take off from Baltimore to Washington, DC in just 15 minutes.

But the Toronto Zoo's proposal would drag visitors to animal pens at a speed of 10 km / h, without accelerating to 30 km / h between five stops.

Magnovate said the trip would become a magnet for visitors "eager to get on the first maglev commercial transit system on our continent." Tickets could cost between $ 12 and $ 15 each way. Magnovate and the zoo would divide the revenues into a 15-year deal.

The zoo staff recommends that the committee give the green light to the proposal.

"It would be an improvement over a guest experience," said Jennifer Tracey, the zoo's senior director of marketing, communications and partnerships.

"In addition, it would operate all year round and be air conditioned where the current Zoomobile (open rail trolley) runs from May to October and in May and October only on weekends."

Sustainable Development Technologies Canada, Dan Corns, Managing Director of Magnovate, said that an earlier funding argument for the zoo project had been welcomed, but that a new application with a firm expression of interest had been made. zoo board of directors would have a better chance.

The project would show investors and potential customers that Magnovate technology, with cars transporting autonomously or in clusters, entering a station on demand while the rest of the cluster continues to operate, is viable for large urban trips says Corns.

The vehicles and track would be lighter than those with traditional connected maglev trains, he said, and costs can be reduced at the zoo, as the monorail track can be adapted.

The proponents hope that the new system, if it is built, will work better than the monorail at the Toronto Zoo, which operated from 1976 to 1994 and cost $ 14 million to build.

Although rented as a futuristic way to comfortably see otherwise inaccessible park parties, the "Domain Ride" crashed in 1991 between trains that injured nine people.

Three years later, a train leaving a station lost power on a steep hill and fell back into another train, returning 37 people to the wounded hospital in various ways.

"It was as if the speed of the chain was reversed," said the 22-year-old train operator at the Star at the time. He has never reopened.

Magnovate badured the zoo's panel that its Maglev technology was safe.

David Rider is the bureau chief of Star's City Hall and a political reporter in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @dmrider

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