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Do tell. Cable suspension and all those towers are cheaper than train tracks? And funiculars are as fast as trains?

Most derailments are caused by maintenance failures, IIRC. With the same standard of maintenance, your dovetail gizmos are less likely to fail, and/or easier to repair?

Don't think so.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Sure, and running it upside down like a chairlift will be so much cheaper than train tracks.

Fanboi alert.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I think our underground systems, MUNI and BART, should tear up their tracks and pave the tubes and run electric busses in them.

Bus systems move rather fewer passengers per driver, and you can get many more people on and off a train in thirty seconds than you can with a bus. For some reason, trains have a lot more door per unit length than a bus does, and it is easier to step off onto a platform than it is to step up into a bus, or down again to get off it

Train, trams. and light rail can shift a lot more people along the same area of track as a bus system.

You were deliberately joking? You didn't signal it all that well.

This is about INTRAURBAN transit; real estate for more roads (or surface rail) is completely unavailable, but the inner cities need traffic to flow. So, tracked vehicles are added either in tunnels, or overhead. Neither of those solutions works well for individual passenger cars.

Huh? To the best of my knowledge, the monorail here in Seattle has had some cars in need of maintenance, but the track has been in continuous use since half a century ago. For mechanical stability, classic two-track rail allows derailment, but a monorail on a dovetail track cannot lift off (though it can still be removed in a maintenance bay). The suspension of a train depends critically on track spacing, the suspension of a monorail has lots of allowed variation (wide tires) and lower contact forces (rubber on concrete, not steel-on-steel). Track maintenance for concrete... well, the Pantheon is made of concrete.

Not at all a fan of monorails, they have all kinds of problems. Just pointing out that your statement assumed the train rides on top of a rail. Not that much extra strength is needed to support a rail it can hang from, and if you use one pillar each side, you can still run a road underneath

I only rode BART once back in the '80s but it seemed rather nice compared to NYC or Boston. Boston's Green Line is the oldest subway in the US and it looks it.

The local bus company is phasing in electric buses.

One of these days I'll have to go for a ride. They're zero fare so it will be a cheap date. I've got to admit I'd rather be behind one of them on a motorcycle than the aging diesel models. For me, the problem is getting into town. If I arrive by car, motorcycle, or bicycle there's little incentive to switch to a bus.

Isn't that Elon Musk's idea? The Boring Company.

Teslas in Tunnels.

Boring emphasizes speed but needs gigabuck tunnels to get that speed. It probably won't happen.

Most public transport emphasizes giant vehicles, like 20-car BART trains with a few hard-to-access stations. Public transport tends to emphasize bigness, to trade latency for speed.

I can drive to work in 12 minutes or spend an hour or more on public transit. Just waiting for a giant BART train on the platform kills about 12 minutes.

San Francisco used to have hundreds of private jitneys that would pick people up and drop them off everywhere. The city outlawed them to force people onto gigabuck public transport full of union labor.

Bring back the electrobats!