ABSTRACT
To coincide with the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle, organizers commissioned the city’s iconic Monorail. Not only was it America’s first full-scale commercial monorail system, serving a stretch of approximately 1.5 kilometers (one mile) between the Central Business District and the Fairgrounds, it was a new form of transit featured in the Elvis Presley movie It Happened at the World’s Fair. In 1968 and again in 1970, ballot initiatives were put forward in Seattle to develop a slightly different transit technology: light rail. Both ballots were rejected. In subsequent years, traffic on highways and arterial streets escalated.
