Last fall, the Onion made fun of Obama’s high-speed rail plan with an alternative high-speed bus proposal. But Wubbo Ockels, a physicist and the first Dutch astronaut, wasn’t laughing.
High-speed trains, Ockels says, are too slow and don’t go where people want to go. So he has designed and built a prototype electric-powered bus capable of going 150 mph. The bus holds 23 passengers and, as he envisions it, would operate on dedicated lanes in the median strips of existing highways. But it could also leave these lanes and operate at conventional speeds on ordinary roads and streets, which means it could serve far more destinations than high-speed trains.
