Anything but trains.
I bet they will do a “special track” for them
Build a train you fucken cowards
🚂🚃🚃🚃
You can always trust in the US-americans to do the right thing, after having exhausted every other possible option.
Trouble is, every time you think they’ve hit rock bottom, they’ll find a new depth to sink to.
They should explore eminent domain and build real transit.
We already did that then tore it all out and let the railroads keep the property and money they schemed, scammed and straight up stole.
But what if there aren’t enough minority neighbourhoods to bulldoze?
The farmland between LA and SF isn’t minority neighborhoods. But my comment was more an off the cuff dismissal of this ass-backward bus idea than an actual policy opinion. Here’s a real policy opinion: Stop making excuses and run the fuckin trains.
There you have your problem: That farmland belongs to rich white people.
Aye, that’s a bit of a pickle.
But I find pickles delicious.
Land isn’t an issue for high speed rail in CA (anymore), so… high speed busses with dedicated lanes is extra silly.
psssst! … trains…
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh!!!
So trams are not on their mind ?
The American mind is just incapable of comprehending trains
We’ve been force-fed this line of bullshit about cars being freedom. Public transportation is for freaks and losers. I mean. GM and Standard Oil say so!
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.
There’s a project, California High Speed Rail, under construction to connect these two cities.
Proposition 1A passed in 2008, followed by the awarding of federal stimulus funds in 2010.
The California HSR was a plot point in the second season of True Detective, which began production in January of 2014.
18 years later, the Phase One between San Francisco and Anaheim is still under construction.
It’s funny because 80% of comments about general “Americans” are also falling for the propaganda
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.
I agree this this is never going to happen, but 110mph isn’t that fast.
But there is no passenger bus that can go that fast and you’d have to build a completely separate track.
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.
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.
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.
Well, don’t get too comfortable with that. The UK is also going in the direction of Oops, All Cars as they slash rail budgets and build out enormous new highway lines.
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.
Trains need much, much less land per passenger than motorways.
I agree, the problem is that we can’t just take the roadways and make them railways. The system that builds the railway needs the money that those roadways support the generation of, which means the railway needs to be put somewhere else. Not a ton of places to do that easily.
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.
physics need not apply
So… that shot actually largely did rely on the laws of physics.
They really did jump a bus.
They just CGI’d out the ramp that got the bus’s nose up, and CGI’d out part of the landing zone, to make up a jumped gap that looked more impressive.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=NPhNIS69ayQ
This was back before you could just CGI generate an entire scene like this… you had to actually do a lot of it for real.
See if you can spot which exact shots/cuts/parts of shots are real, and which are fake, in that sequence.
Trying to recall the movie but from the 70’s or 60’s. Something like atomic bus
Do you mean The Big Bus (1976) ?
Oh hell yes!
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…
Once again, the Onion has predicted the news before it happens…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNixDlRoMvAThe 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.
Oh don’t worry.
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.
Ahaha nonono. The problem is that the land is owned by white people. If it were owned by black people, then it would already have been bulldozed.
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.
Damn, if only eminent domain existed
Even with eminent domain though you still have to pay market value. Edit: Not that they shouldn’t do it. It would still be worth it in the long run
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.
They’d never attempt the battle due to The Rich’s Legislators and Governor
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.
There is no amount of traffic that would make me consider getting in a robot-controlled 140 mph bus lmao.
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.
They’re currently building high speed rail, but it’s 14 years from opening by current estates.
Was supposed to be done by now, it’s been a shitshow, but it seems to have improved in recent years.
A lot of it is commercial rail that nobody wants to disrupt
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!
Shanghai maglev
Communism Killed 10 Trillion People, though.
So we have to stick with cars
[Insert image of Chinese EVs]
No, idiot. American cars only.
Not to mention that’s quite a dangerous speed for a bus
Hey, if that bus drops below 55, we got a way to deal with that.
recycling the classics
Obama Replaces Costly High-Speed Rail Plan With High-Speed Bus Plan
Everything but rail, huh?
