To heck with it. Let's not build any more highways.

As evidenced by the failure last month of Gov. Schwarzenegger's bond proposal to pass muster with our representatives in Sacramento, they have little interest in funding highway expansion until they can get their pork in the barrel and undercut the governor's run for a second term.

Meanwhile, we'll fume amid fumes, twiddling thumbs while we wait for politicians to extract their heads from their nether regions. And, even if they manage the extrication, any action they take likely will leave us in gridlock for decades.

So, let's just maintain the highways we have and find another way to solve our problem. The longer we sit in increasingly worse traffic the more likely we'll be to demand they get their acts together and come up with a real solution.

But what to do? California's ground-level high-speed-rail project is in deep weeds and, while better than building more highways, it won't really solve our commuting problem.

What we need is a visionary. Someone like, oh, Ray Bradbury. Most people probably think of Bradbury as "only" a science-fiction writer. Let's, for the moment, regard him as a futurist.

In 1963, Bradbury stood before the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors and said: "Rarely have so many owed so little to so few." The supervisors had just rejected an offer by Alweg Monorail to build a monorail system for free if they would be allowed to operate it and collect the fares.

Wrote Bradbury in the Los Angeles Times earlier this year: "I was stunned. I dimly saw, even at that time, the future of freeways, which would, in the end, go nowhere."

Monorails? They're those things that scoot you around theme parks, right? Right -- and cities around the world. Each day hundreds of thousands of commuters use them. Japan has eight full-scale urban systems. And more systems are being built around the world.

Why monorails?

When it comes to safety, they apparently beat all other forms of transportation. Their design makes derailment all but impossible and there are no reports of fatalities anywhere in the world. In fact, the Japanese system has operated since 1964 with no interruptions lasting longer than a half-hour.

Environmentalists should love it. Most of the systems use electric engines, so there's no air pollution; rubber wheels are used so there's no noise pollution; and construction of the lines is achieved with relatively little disruption to the environment -- the parts are built off-site, brought in and assembled.

There is no tunneling, no problems with grade crossings and generally they can be built using existing right-of-ways.

And then there's the bottom line: When can we get them and how much?

Monorail construction is relatively quick. Experts say it is possible to build a system in five years. Cost? Reportedly a fraction of conventional rail lines, and cheaper than highways when you consider they actually solve the problem without constantly adding lines and often operate at a profit. It's worth noting that Congress has approved more than $6 million in matching grant funds for South Carolina.

So, why not at least look at a monorail link between Southern California's cities? That answer will come from the special interests.

Phil Strickland of Temecula is a regular columnist for The Californian. E-mail: philipestrickland@yahoo.com.