One of the two consortia bidding for the contract to build the Seattle Monorail, Team Monorail, has pulled out. This is the team that was headed by Bombardier, the company the built the Las Vegas monorail. This leaves only one, the Hitachi-based Cascadia Monorail Company, in contention.
Competative bidding on the monorail has been effectively killed. Cascadia can ask whatever it wants and the monorail will have to take it or leave it. This is not an auspicious place to be for an agency that claims it has found a new, better way to do things.
Comic relief is provided by monorail director Joel Horn, who is quoted as saying:
While we had hoped to receive proposals from two contractor teams, from the outset this process has anticipated that eventually we'd be dealing with only one team.Of course the monorail wants to get there eventually, but as a matter of choice not necessity. Trying to put positive spin on this event is just ridiculous.