The tram train idea is the best one.
https://youtu.be/r5M7Oq1PCz4 This one of his is funnier and makes better points.
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2025
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Great, lets waste a few million euros on yet another "Dahir Insaat" style pod based Gadgetbahn. I can't wait to stand in traffic in my pod because a lot of people want to exit at the same station.
If these dudes want to make a bunch of money just make the high speed trains and rail system we need in America. Everyone will buy tickets. You will be a literal train baron. I don't get these half assed ideas. Just do the damn thing.
The are raising venture capital for whizzbang ideas rather than products that exist and require real planning, logistics, and engineering to bring to market in a cost effective way that will only generate enough profits to entice stable long-term investors with actual expectations. Like Tesla AI cabs rather than city bus/metro systems that do actual heavy-lifting to reduce traffic
We have a lot of abandoned rail here in Canada. I've often thought about making a very simple low-speed "rail chair with wheels" that I can put in my backpack and mess around with for fun. Hooking up to old rails is cool, but not as cool as having trains. Bring back trains!
Its illegal to be on or near railroad tracks though.
Doesn't this usually only apply to active ones rather than abandoned track?
Not always but yeah, and no one really cares.
Only if you get caught ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Hey Groesbeek! Stelletje benzineverslaafde boomers! Zo, nu ik jullie aandacht heb, een oplossing, gezien jullie er geen zin in hebben dat er een grote zware spoorlijn dwars door je dorp gaat. Dus hier het alternatief:
Een tram.
Jullie hoeven een minder opzichtige halte te bouwen EN lichtere infra die veel beter bij de "Franse flair" van jullie straatbeeld past, terwijl de buren bij Nijmegen en Kleve hun spoorverbinding weer hebben. Iedereen blij.
Definitely the best solution.
They need public transport but they are too proud to admit it
They want to monetize public transport without paying for building any new infrastructure.
Except by subsidizing the tech bros to do it, they think they’re offloading the risk when it fails and the opposition can’t blame them.
Pretty much the same reason CEOs are paid so much to be the fall guys, and also why CEOs and tech bros both think they are so much better than the rest of us.
Don't forget the politicians probably also get campaign donations and/or free publicity from being involved...
Also they get to use up unused railways, it's like future austerity by preventing those lines being reopened or repurposed as bicycle paths in the future...
But you see, this is a small capacity, on demand monorail "pod" that serve the purpose of antisocial that is unwilling to share a public transport like the rest of the peasant do.
That’s exactly why tech bro solutions always have pods. Tells you a lot about their world views. Everyone outside their close social bubble is disgusting to them and needs to be separated from them.
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I'm pretty sure this is just a way of utilizing abandoned rail lines that aren't fit for full size trains.
Can they just invent fucking human bubbles and we can adapt the logical already existent forms of public transport instead
I can see this working in places where there's a single abandoned line and no budget to recover it. I've seen plenty of these in SE Asia. A small government investment (skip all the app bullshit etc) could make these work to inter connect small villages that otherwise would waste hours on shitty poorly maintained roads. If it can be made low-tech, I can see this being useful.
and unsurprisingly it's a german project, a country which is absolutely fucking covered in rural lines that are just rusting away
like, holy shit, can we stop branding everything that isn't a bog-standard train as "tech bro gadgetbahn"? this thing very explicitly has a specific problem it's trying to solve.
Germans had a working solution to this for decades, but apparently gave up on it for some reason (not competitive with road traffic is probably the correct one)
It was called a railbus and they were once quite prevalent on European branch lines. Finland had and Sweden loads as well, in rural areas, until someone decided that a normal bus is better for some reason.
the problem is that you still need a driver, so frequency is going to be limited, which makes the service barely usable. Lack of places for vehicles to pass also limits possible frequency on these rural lines.
the idea behind monocab is that you can just throw more vehicles at the problem, so people can either just order a cab or you can have them constantly circulating like a very strange merry-go-round.
Railbuses are still good, but they made a lot more sense in the past. These days people have very very little tolerance for waiting.
If that pod can be automated, the rail bus can be automated.
Trains are expensive, high-capacity vehicles.
If these small cheap vehicles can repurpose tracks in low demand areas, what's so bad about it?
exactly, i'm catiously optimistic because if this works it could be kinda revolutionary, if rural germans can be convinced to use some form of public transport that's a huge step towards weaning that hideously car-brained nation off the deathmobiles.
and the big thing with these is that they just run on normal tracks, so you can just.. start running normal trains once you see that ridership with the monocabs is reaching sufficient numbers!
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See the whole video. Adam is using a clickbait title but the problem is actually a local Dutch government not the bros themselves, and the solution is a tram train.
Fuvk it; still better than cars. The physics alone are an improvement.
Aside from it being built by tech bros, i actually like this. It could serve a purpose similar to public transport like car sharing (not carpooling) and rental bikes. This would be far from as efficient as regular trains or street cars, but those modes of transports need volume. As soon the population that uses the rail decreases to a point it becomes to expensive to run a train every one or two hours, often the expensive physical infrastructure remains while the service disappears. In those cases i could totally see this being a better option than heavily subsidising or totally removing trains on that section of rail. But to be honest, I can't imagine there are enough of those places on earth carry the costs to develop this tech, also because these cars are only the best fit if the abandoned line is a single track line.
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