Buses will be primarily used to get people to a train station.
The inter-city bus routes of today will quickly fade as soon as train service is provided.
-Buses cannot go as fast as trains. They go 65 mph, trains go over 100 mph.
-Buses cannot provide as many amenities as trains.
-Highways will be deteriorating.
-Taxpayers will not want to pay 50% of the cost of bus transportation (highway infrastructure, no increase in gas tax).
I don't think highways will disappear. What will happen--what is happening--is that the use of highways, particularly cars, is being rethought. They are no longer "freedom," or "status," they are just tools, appliances.
In addition to that, the road system has been vastly overbuilt, and the railroad system overly shrunk. If you start having to pay for the road system the way we should have been paying for it, then it may be we don't need quite so much of it--and it becomes practical to rebuild some of the rail lines we took out.
Posted by: David Lubic | March 26, 2014 at 02:15 AM
If you have no highway structure, how will farm crops get to market? Farmers have to drive harvests to market, co-ops or trains for transportation to the rest of the US. If taxpayers won't pay for highway infrastructure, how do they plan to buy groceries?
Posted by: Rebel Eichelberger | March 23, 2014 at 11:35 PM