California is looking into high-speed coaches that could someday travel at up to 140 mph (225 km/h) and connect Los Angeles with San Francisco in just over three hours.
The express service could connect major metro areas in the US state such as Sacramento, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles and San Diego. The buses would travel much faster than car or coaches on normal roads where speed limits are much lower.
The California Department of Transportation, also known as Caltrans, said it had been researching the concept for at least a year.
The idea is to build dedicated bus lanes and stations along existing California freeways. It was not clear whether the buses would be powered by electricity or hydrogen.
“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.
Caltrans officials say the idea is not intended to replace rail systems, but explore whether high-speed bus travel could complement existing transportation options. The transit authority said the project remains in the very early stages with no immediate plans to build a system.
One proposed route would take passengers between San Francisco and Los Angeles in about 3 hours and 12 minutes. The roughly 380-mile trip currently takes anywhere from seven-and-a-half to nine hours by direct Greyhound diesel bus.
Researchers are probing similar examples abroad, such as South Australia’s guided bus system in Adelaide and the Netherlands’ Superbus prototype, to see whether such a system could work in California.
The Superbus prototype was unveiled in 2011 and showcased internationally. While it demonstrated the potential for high-speed sustainable transport, the ambitious concept ultimately transitioned from an active test vehicle into a static museum exhibit.
Caltrans said the project would also require a lot of new tech, like aerodynamic buses, vehicle-to-everything communication, automated driving systems and advanced braking systems.
It could serve as a "complementary option alongside existing solutions like rail, not to replace them," Mehdi Moeinaddini, a senior transportation planner at Caltrans, told KCRA about the high-speed buses.
