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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I can see this working in places where there's a single abandoned line and no budget to recover it. I've seen plenty of these in SE Asia. A small government investment (skip all the app bullshit etc) could make these work to inter connect small villages that otherwise would waste hours on shitty poorly maintained roads. If it can be made low-tech, I can see this being useful.
and unsurprisingly it's a german project, a country which is absolutely fucking covered in rural lines that are just rusting away
like, holy shit, can we stop branding everything that isn't a bog-standard train as "tech bro gadgetbahn"? this thing very explicitly has a specific problem it's trying to solve.
Germans had a working solution to this for decades, but apparently gave up on it for some reason (not competitive with road traffic is probably the correct one)
It was called a railbus and they were once quite prevalent on European branch lines. Finland had and Sweden loads as well, in rural areas, until someone decided that a normal bus is better for some reason.
the problem is that you still need a driver, so frequency is going to be limited, which makes the service barely usable. Lack of places for vehicles to pass also limits possible frequency on these rural lines.
the idea behind monocab is that you can just throw more vehicles at the problem, so people can either just order a cab or you can have them constantly circulating like a very strange merry-go-round.
Railbuses are still good, but they made a lot more sense in the past. These days people have very very little tolerance for waiting.
Trains are expensive, high-capacity vehicles.
If these small cheap vehicles can repurpose tracks in low demand areas, what's so bad about it?
exactly, i'm catiously optimistic because if this works it could be kinda revolutionary, if rural germans can be convinced to use some form of public transport that's a huge step towards weaning that hideously car-brained nation off the deathmobiles.
and the big thing with these is that they just run on normal tracks, so you can just.. start running normal trains once you see that ridership with the monocabs is reaching sufficient numbers!
Because 9/10 times they are awful, expensive, unused, and quickly shut down.
You don't see any of these niche techslop pods operating anywhere you actually go, because they don't work.
have you actually looked at what we're talking about, like at all? or are you just following the programming of "small vehicle=bad"?
okay so where do these things actually work?
on the testing tracks, because it's new technology and needs to be exhaustively tested before the government allows it to be put into service.
like, trains were also new technology at one point, being new doesn't somehow inherently make it bad lmao