Anything but trains.
There are already rails between LA and SF. Why not use them?
Because it takes 8+ hours.
I was being rhetorical. There is infrastructure that can be developed here.
I’ve got one! A people movie treadmill! 300mph. You catch a local taxi, it accelerated to 80mph. Then you jump on to a plane which then takes you from 80 to 300. Then you jump on the treadmill. Don’t know yet how to get you off. Bit its not disgusting.
Trying to turn I5 into the autobahn with a 140 mph bus lane would result in so much chaos and destruction that honestly I’m all for it.
There is 0 chance that the average American drivers liscense having brain could comprehend this concept.
Most people can’t even keep an actually reasonable following distance, or understand the concept of a passing lane.
This is a literally comically stupid idea, its a B movie plot element from an 80s scifi movie.
Fuck it -> Do it for the lols.
This is a literally comically stupid idea, its a B movie plot element from an 80s scifi movie.
Trying to recall the movie but from the 70’s or 60’s. Something like atomic bus
There is no amount of traffic that would make me consider getting in a robot-controlled 140 mph bus lmao.
The American mind is just incapable of comprehending trains
We can comprehend just fine. There’s a project, California High Speed Rail, under construction to connect these two cities. The trouble is that our political and economic systems have become so sclerotic that China has built an entire HSR network since work on this line began, and it won’t even be done before 2031.
We can still build highways, because the political and regulatory mechanisms to create them were fine-tuned as the system crystalized into inflexibility.
Frankly, this exact inability of U.S. society to change and adapt to new conditions was the signal indicator of the incipient collapse, for me.
It’s funny because 80% of comments about general “Americans” are also falling for the propaganda
Dedicated buslanes are great, but they can cause lumpy tarmac if you run a high frequency, high maintenance costs that could detract from other highway repairs…
Maybe add some long rows of steel reinforcement into the buslane (just to reduce maintenance costs of course), a protective barrier / embankment to stop cars encroaching.
Use E-busses of course, but maybe overhead wires, purely to reduce weight and fire risk.
/jk
I know in reality the curves and grades on a highway are too tight and steep, so you need a new easement.
If you wanted to build a track for these “high speed buses” it would require special safety features, signalling, barriers etc. that make it look much more like a train track than like a motorway. So you’d gain exactly nothing over building a train track.
Not true. Not even close. According to the article, the bus lanes would be built on existing infrastructure. The bridges exist, the right-of-way exists, there would be comparatively little political resistance, the cost would be MUCH lower. Also, maintenance costs would be much lower.
But those aren’t going to do 180 km/h. No existing bus will achieve this kind of speed on a regular motorway. This is all just a bunch of hot air.
Well, yes, exactly. A nation cannot remain an economic superpower by frittering away its wealth on expensive, but suboptimal shit like a “highway” for high-speed buses. If it’s no longer able able to build effective, cheap infrastructure because it doesn’t benefit an entrenched industry, then collapse isn’t far off.
Have you ever looked at how much the land costs where we would put the trains?
This is more of an unrestrained capitalism thing rather than a distinctly American thing.
I comprehend it fine. UK life, no car, train only for going on five years. Cheaper than owning a car, even with the occasional taxi ride. Get more steps in, too.
The reason for busses is simple and seems to be ignored by literally everyone.
The private property between SF and LA keeps increasing in price so the costs for the project are in the billions before anything is even built. The signing of the land is in the billions. Now build a rail in Trump’s economy and it becomes nearly impossible to succeed at anything rail.
Busses builds an audience that can be used to later justify rail to get buses off the road. Americans hate big trucks on the road but there they are anyway. It’s a slow burn turn to morph the car brain into train brain.
Weird how cities used eminent domain to bulldoze entire black and Hispanic neighborhoods to build highways yet can’t use eminent domain to get some rich assholes overpriced real estate for this.
The city would lose the legal battle due to The Rich’s lawyers.
Same reason we can’t have it in the UK. We won’t just pass a bill to CPO the land off (or take something else off) all the tory cunts at a nominal /cost price instead of market price.
Or even if we do we’ll elect tories back in before it can be built, and give them the land back, probably for less than they were already compensated.
I think almost all of our railway routes were set out in 1800s when parliament and financiers went nuts for trains. We’re just lucky enough that some low speed rail survived the 50s-90s when they tried to wipe them out totally. Even the carpilled couldn’t fly that hard in the face of facts.
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=QNixDlRoMvAOh don’t worry.
Wow, 140MPH! That’s … still 84MPH slower than the fastest trains in Europe, and 127MPH slower than the fastest train in Asia (Shanghai maglev).
These stupid fantasies are still a pale shadow of what the rest of the world has already managed to achieve. Just finish building the fucking train already!
Hey, if that bus drops below 55, we got a way to deal with that.
Not to mention that’s quite a dangerous speed for a bus
You’re fucking kidding me. Schrodinger’s Onion
Everything but rail, huh?
recycling the classics
Obama Replaces Costly High-Speed Rail Plan With High-Speed Bus Plan
Y’all, they’re building a high speed train, but it’s mired in problems, and if the economy crashes, it will be decades before it’s completed. This would be a medium-term solution that’s easy to build, and easy to take down when it’s no longer needed.
These “high speed buses” don’t even exist in theory. So it would just be plain old regular buses. You can have these now.
This bus proposal is basically a ‘back to the drawing board’ plan. How can you get people to travel between SF and LA faster than driving, and maybe cheaper than flying, especially if jet-fuel prices stay high.
It’s going to follow the existing roadways. What the original high-speed rail project could have done, instead of jogging far inland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_of_California_High-Speed_Rail
Given diesel fuel costs, they’ll probably end up with EV, perhaps with overhead cabling. And to avoid expensive ‘self-driving’ buses, maybe they’ll put down ‘guide lines.’ To be able to go faster than cars, they’ll have their own lane, or use center divider areas. And to avoid pollution and wear and tear, instead of rubber tires, they’ll go with metal wheels. But to prevent damage to the roads, maybe they’ll have to swap the guide lines with hard metal, protective lines…
Meanwhile, elsewhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China
Why is American society so braindead?
Does “under controlled conditions” include the blizzards over the Grapevine that occur almost every winter?
