California Is Exploring High-Speed Buses That Connect LA and San Francisco in Just Over 3 Hours
a month ago by Diplomjodler to c/fuckcars
Anything but 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.
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.
Thereโs 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.
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.
They need to run the rails down the medians of highways. The land is already in use for transportation, and already connects the most important cities. Might as well have do double duty. It will be easier to do that, than acquire and develop all that new land.
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!
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.
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.
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=QNixDlRoMvA
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.
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.
Do you mean The Big Bus (1976) ?
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.
They'd never attempt the battle due to The Rich's Legislators and Governor
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
Governments can have a funny way of determining market value based on whether they like you or not.
Just point to a row of buildings and declare "slum clearance". Suddenly, you can get them for a steal.
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.
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.
Build a train you fucken cowards
๐๐๐๐
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!
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.
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.
recycling the classics
Obama Replaces Costly High-Speed Rail Plan With High-Speed Bus Plan
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh!!!!
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.
Because it takes 8+ hours.
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
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.
They should explore eminent domain and build real transit.
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.
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.
Land isn't an issue for high speed rail in CA (anymore), so... high speed busses with dedicated lanes is extra silly.
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.
Youโre fucking kidding me. Schrodingerโs Onion
Why is American society so braindead?
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
Isaac Asimov
We are a nation of idolwhorshipers. We whorship celebrities and dream of becoming soldiers and/or princesses. We are commiting a genocide with no fucks given. We like to be used and abused. Skeet skeeet into the rag and throw us on to the ground. We were raised wrong. Just put the tacobell grade D meat on the credit card. YOLO We are sluts and we hate ourselves. The men in the imperial core religious or not get our dicks cut at birth because... well just because. We are imperial slaves. We have no history but phoney optics from the past and gallons and gallons of human blood. We are losers.. assigned at birth. We are fake smilers and colonial jailers. We are turds who like the smell of turds. We only know our shitbox. We are creatures of the mostly lowly and depraved
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/...
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/...
How fast do they expect these "high speed" busses to go, and still remain safe? They'd have to put them on some kind of a track...
Does "under controlled conditions" include the blizzards over the Grapevine that occur almost every winter?
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@lemmy.world
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
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Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, letโs try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
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The American mind is just incapable of comprehending trains
save