I thought they ate the onion but somehow this appears to be an actual serious study. I can’t imagine how uncomfortable a bus going 140mph would be. At that point the engineering required to keep the road in appropriate shape is likely more expensive than just using rails…
The autobahn already achieves this on a daily basis for personal vehicles. It should absolutely be doable to build dedicated busses along highways that can reach this speed assuming separated lanes.
A key benefit here is that existing highway infrastructure can be repurposed rather than needing to buy (expensive) land and building a rail system from scratch (takes time).
This is an outside the box solution that might be self-justifying: providing faster (better) service than cars and potentially offloading enough passengers to reduce more than 1 lane of traffic. Many ways to get more public transit usage in the US are probably better than the status quo.
Would proper rail be better? Absolutely.
This is terribly inefficient in comparison, but maybe could be cheaper, faster and easier to implement. Worth having a few guys look into it at least.
I thought they ate the onion but somehow this appears to be an actual serious study. I can’t imagine how uncomfortable a bus going 140mph would be. At that point the engineering required to keep the road in appropriate shape is likely more expensive than just using rails…
The autobahn already achieves this on a daily basis for personal vehicles. It should absolutely be doable to build dedicated busses along highways that can reach this speed assuming separated lanes.
A key benefit here is that existing highway infrastructure can be repurposed rather than needing to buy (expensive) land and building a rail system from scratch (takes time).
This is an outside the box solution that might be self-justifying: providing faster (better) service than cars and potentially offloading enough passengers to reduce more than 1 lane of traffic. Many ways to get more public transit usage in the US are probably better than the status quo.
Would proper rail be better? Absolutely.
This is terribly inefficient in comparison, but maybe could be cheaper, faster and easier to implement. Worth having a few guys look into it at least.
Once again, the Onion has predicted the news before it happens…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNixDlRoMvA
Oh don’t worry.