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.
A preliminary review from last year found that the project would require major infrastructure upgrades before anything close to that speed could be possible.
Currently, California freeways are generally designed to support speeds of up to about 85 miles per hour because of factors like sight distance and curb stability.
The project would also require a lot of new tech, like aerodynamic buses, vehicle-to-everything communication, automated driving systems, and advanced braking systems.
Still, Caltrans believes the project is at least theoretically possible.
“Despite significant engineering hurdles, it is conceptually feasible to operate buses safely at high speeds under controlled conditions,” the review reads. “However, real-world implementation requires incremental approaches, substantial investments in infrastructure, technology, and rigorous validation through field tests.”
The proposed bus system is being discussed as California continues to pursue its high-speed rail project.
“It might offer 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.
Last year, the Trump administration pulled $4 billion in federal funding from the state’s bullet train project over missed deadlines and growing costs.
The California High-Speed Rail project, approved by voters in 2008, was pitched as an 800-mile rail system linking Northern and Southern California, with trains traveling at speeds up to 220 miles per hour. A planned second phase would extend the line further, reaching Sacramento in the north and San Diego in the south. The project was initially projected to cost $33 billion and be completed by 2020. But after years of delays and escalating construction costs, the estimated price tag has now surged past $100 billion.
However, the state is still moving forward with the project. Construction is ongoing for an initial 119-mile stretch connecting Fresno and Bakersfield in California’s Central Valley.
Caltrans did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Gizmodo.
