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Show Weston Suggests Monorail System for Downtown Salt Lake Speaking from the floor as a citizen, Joseph H. Weston, Democratic Demo-cratic candidate for the United States Senate, recomended to the Downtown Planning Association, Associ-ation, at their town meeting in the Salt Lake City commission chambers Tuesday night, that serious thought be given to the construction of a monorail system sys-tem to solve the problem of rapid interurban mass transportation. No other candidates for office were present, although it was a meeting of such vital civic importance im-portance that Major J. Bracken Lee and all members of the city commission honored it with their presence, as did several other elected officials currently hold- ing office. Mr. Weston observed that it is time that Salt Lake City started thinking of itself as a big city and as being the center of a huge metropolitan area. His brief talk suddenly has be-1 come one of the main topics of conversation among many of the business, civic and political leaders lead-ers of the state. Part of it follows: fol-lows: Some American cities have somewhat conquered the limitations limita-tions of automobile traffic. About three years ago, New Yorkers suddenly realized that auto traffic traf-fic congestion was costing them too much lost time, and so they began to flock back to their subways, sub-ways, which they had neglected and all but abandoned for a period of about 20 years. Now the subways are again flourishing, flourish-ing, and downtown New York, which had begun to decay when dependent upon auto traffic, has made a remarkable comeback in property values and in business transacted. If downtown Salt Lake City is ever to be able to offer the residents resi-dents of this metropolitan area the same sort of service as Macy's in New York, for example, or the same sort of cultural leadership as to be found on New York's Broadway, we must provide a cheap, swift, safe and efficient means of conveying the population popula-tion into and out of the city from points as far away as Brigham City on the north and Payson on the south. The answer is a monorail system, sys-tem, which could bring a Brig-ham Brig-ham City housewife into downtown down-town Salt Lake City in half an hour. The fare would be cheap. She would travel in safety. A world-famous musician or speaker could be profitably billed at a place as large as the LDS tabernacle, and half the v population of Utah, if they cared to, would be able to come hear him in person and return to their homes the same evening. The downtown merchants would tend gradually to increass their traffic in valuable, lightweight light-weight goods that could be carried car-ried in the arms, and the smaller town merchant would tend toward to-ward dealing in the heavier types of merchandise that require local auto or truck delivery. So all businesses in the entire metropolitan metro-politan area would profit. |