… notice the hands-free driving
intercst
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All bus drivers drive like this in the UK 
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I noticed he’s on the wrong side of the road. He has a license?
JimA
A recent letter to the editor in St. Louis reported a similar system in Kansas City. They built a ten mile express bus route with modern stations (indicating arrival time of next bus), limited stops, low floor (easy to get on) buses, and traffic signals that give buses priority. This was much less costly than building a light rail route.
And riders like the result.
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Los Angeles has had a very useful busway for decades.
d fb
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Streetcars (buses on rails) are stupid. Buses with all the bells and whistles are way cheaper.
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Vancouver, WA has had Bus Rapid Transit for quite a while. Now that we’re getting battery-powered, large size articulated buses with better acceleration, they should be closing in on the transit times for light rail.
Bus rapid transit - Wikipedia
intercst
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Detroit built a streetcar line up Woodward a few years ago. There was a lot of chatter at the time that a streetcar line was built, rather than the busses improved, to keep the improved transit on Woodward, rather than the improvements being made in the neighborhood where people live.
Personally, I like monorails, because they don’t take road space away from traffic, and they are not subject to streetlights and traffic jams. The thing is cost. Seattle tried to extend it’s monorail line to the sports stadiums, but costs soared and the project was terminated.
Steve
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Porto has converted streetcars (trams) into tourist attractions much like San Francisco with cablecars. It’s jobs!
The Captain
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Vegas has a monorail system running behind the casinos. The obvious connection would be to the airport, but that hasn’t happened. There is chatter the “JCs” running the shuttle busses and cabs to the airport have something to do with the lack of a monorail connection. I have read that the Vegas trains are refurbished Disneyworld trains.
When I rode the Seattle monorail, all I could think was "why doesn’t every city have these?
The grandpappy of all of them. Wuppertal, Germany. In service over a century.
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“For example, the actual total cost to install a mile of monorail in Las Vegas right now (based on actual project costs) is approximately $141 million a mile – more than four times the price per mile what it has cost so far to build the existing (and rapidly expanding) 45-mile Dallas light rail system, and more than three times what light rail is projected to cost per mile for new-start LRT projects such as the one now underway in Charlotte, NC.”
https://www.lightrailnow.org/features/f_monorail006.htm
DB2
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How does Musk’s Vegas tunnel compare?
The Captain
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Monorail was a very bright “good idea” that did not work out in reality. The design does have advantages where space is very limited, but is more expensive than modern welded rail systems.
david fb
About the same. Stuck in the “it can be done but no reason to do it” category.
Laying track on ground is going to be cheaper, if you have open ground. In Detroit, the “light rail” takes space away from vehicle traffic. Of course, a normal bus cohabits with vehicle traffic, so no special roadway at all is needed.
Some of the stations are in the middle of the street. I keep having visions of people running to the middle-of-the-street Q-Line station to catch the streetcar, not seeing the traffic coming down the street, and getting splattered. I didn’t know, before watching this video, that many of the stops are “sponsored”.
Detroit also has an elevated “people mover”. But it only goes in one direction, around downtown. If you don’t plan where you park carefully, you have to go most of the way around downtown, to get only a few blocks from where your parked.
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Mass transit bonus!
When Tandy Corp built their new HQ in downtown Ford Worth, in the mid 70s, they built on the former site of a department store.
The owners of the old department store had solved their customer parking problem by buying up land in the flood plain by the river. Problem was, that land was several blocks away from the site of the store. They solved the problem by buying some old streetcars, and building a subway line between the store and the parking lot.
When Tandy built their new HQ, the lower three floors were a shopping mall. Tandy renovated the street cars, with new, modern looking, bodywork, and continued the free subway service to the parking lot. I took that ride, for the halibut, one day. The mall station was next to the Dillard’s store in the mall.
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