While construction is still underway on California’s long-delayed high-speed rail system, the Golden State is now looking into high-speed buses that could someday travel up to 140 miles per hour.
The California Department of Transportation, also known as Caltrans, has been researching the concept for at least a year and discussed it recently during a webinar.
The basic idea is to build dedicated bus lanes and stations along existing California freeways.
“Long-distance travel by bus could become an attractive and affordable way to go between California metropolitan areas,” Ryan Snyder, Caltrans’s feasibility studies manager, told local news station KCRA on Wednesday.
The high-speed bus service could connect major California metro areas like Sacramento, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and San Diego.
One proposed route would take passengers between San Francisco and Los Angeles in about 3 hours and 12 minutes, with buses traveling at around 120 miles per hour. The roughly 380-mile trip currently takes anywhere from seven-and-a-half to nine hours by a direct Greyhound bus.
Researchers are looking at examples abroad, including South Australia’s Adelaide O-Bahn busway system and the Netherlands’ Superbus prototype, to see whether such a system could work in California.
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