Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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.