mindstalk | (Reply)

Yeah, I've been through it on Greyhound more than once.

"Day's trip" seems rather an exaggeration, looking at a map. Montana's only 600 miles wide, and less tall. Roads wind, true, but 60 mph is still going to take you through a lot of the state in 8 hours.

There's also that this scheme is going to have buses running down the main highways every hour anyway, to connect the big population centers; small places on the highway can get service pretty naturally, especially on a "signal for dropoff or call ahead to get picked up" basis.

Off-highway towns... less realistically likely to get supported; I did say "on every road", that's partly to show how relatively cheap it'd be -- if society chose to support a principle that you should be able to get from A to B even if you can't drive. Practicality... yes, there'd be a lot of empty capacity in order to maintain capability, just as a private car lies idle most of the time just to support its owners capability.

There's multiple levels of public transportation; despite my "every road" upper bound (of which there are apparently 2.7 million paved miles and 1.3 million unpaved, compared to 75,000 km -- unit switch -- of highways) this was mostly about interurban transit, being able to get out of town and eventually to any major location in the US, also some amount of medium-distance job commuting. For day to day local public transportation once an hour pretty much sucks -- though better than nothing for those with no other choice. "Every five minute" local service through Montana probably isn't practical. Every hour intertown seems doable.