Once again, the Onion has predicted the news before it happens..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNixDlRoMvA

Oh don't worry.

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh!!!!

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 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

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.

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.

These "high speed buses" don't even exist in theory. So it would just be plain old regular buses. You can have these now.

The Roads Must Roll

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.

But what if there aren't enough minority neighbourhoods to bulldoze?

Because it takes 8+ hours.

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