Commentary: The ‘Super Bus’ is just More Evidence Caltrans is Irredeemable

A French TGV Duplex high-speed train cruises at around 200 mph on electric power alone and has over 500 seats. On highly traveled corridors, two trains are often coupled together, meaning one driver (and a handful of crew) carry over 1,000 passengers, all on an electrical grid that produces nearly zero CO2.

What more do I have to say about Caltrans’s most recent stupidity, a study into using 140-mph, high-speed buses to move people around California as some kind of thinly veiled alternative to high-speed rail? Sure, I could get into the many other non-starter flaws in the high-speed bus proposal; I could write about wheel-surface interfaces, safety, etc., but what’s the point? Anybody who knows anything about transportation already gets that this is ridiculous. Yeah, you can run a bus-like vehicle at over 150 mph under controlled circumstances, such as the 23-seat “bus” pictured in the lead image that was built in the Netherlands. But that was a stunt, not a real mass-transportation proposal.

Sometimes I think I’ve gone too far over the years, suggesting that Caltrans, which still acts as if it’s the California Department of Highways, is so f*ed up that the only way to fix it is to dismantle the agency, blacklist most of its “engineers,” and start over.

But now that the agency has reduced itself to doing studies that are literally an Onion parody, I know I’m right.

Yes, the Onion parody embedded above came years before the Caltrans proposal. I wonder if Caltrans is trolling us.

Either way, Caltrans has an annual budget of nearly $20 billion. This is an agency that is widening a freeway in the North Bay that will be underwater in a few decades. This is an agency that consistently builds the most dangerous roads in the state. They gaslight continually about not widening freeways, as they keep widening freeways and ruining our environment.

It’s not as if there aren’t productive things the California Department of Transportation could be doing to help people move around. How about funding another passenger train on the Coast? How about acquiring, double-tracking, and electrifying the state’s train tracks to improve performance? How about building some safe bike infrastructure instead of throwing down some paint as a way to greenwash a freeway widening? How about building bike lanes instead of ripping them out? They could even, I dunno, help with the state’s high-speed rail program. Instead, they want to study high-speed bus lanes as an excuse to continue widening freeways.

It’s wild that the mainstream press reported on the high-speed bus study as if it were worthy of anything except derision.

Caltrans is run by and to a large extent staffed by greedy, gaslighting buffoons. And it’s long past time to get rid of these posers and hire some qualified managers, engineers, and planners who care about safety and transportation and know something beyond “widen freeway, spend money.” At this point, I don’t know how that can be done except by breaking up the agency and blacklisting most of its staff, starting with the jackasses who authorized and worked on the high-speed bus study.