This idea of course is massively expensive, but would provide a very useful means of travelling. Instead of a conventional train, imagine a continuous conveyor-belt like highway running 24/7 at high speed and in both directions, stretching say from San Diego to San Francisco. If you could somehow get your car on and off this easily you could then travel in restful comfort as far as you need to go. In order to accomplish this, all along the moving freeway in various towns and locations there are conventional high speed trains that stop and start, running alongside at exactly the same speed (as the moving freeway) allowing you to drive your car onto the moving freeway when you begin your journey and off of it when you near your destination...
I agree
No opinion
I disagree
Add your comment
This is a very interesting idea! (If a little futuristic.) Note: you already get trains-for-cars. The Channel Tunnel rail link between the UK and continental Europe being a notable one.
I had always envisaged a series of moving surfaces(a mirror image of this being for the other direction) with the slowest moving one at the outside(say walking pace) and each band gets faster towards the centre. If one wishes to travel further and faster one has to walk forward on the surface you are on and step over to the next faster band nearer the centre etc etc until you are on the fastest band. Vice versa for slowing down. I can only see it working in Sci Fi films unfortunately as in real life I am sure everyone would end up in a big heap of arms and legs.
'Peopleators' like this exist elsewhere (such as the one in Hong Kong from Central towards the Peak). For cars, they would indeed be massively expensive.
This concept was explored in depth in a science fiction story by Robert Heinlein in the 1940's called "The Roads Must Roll".
As to the idea in general, I would say that the people are in effect riding a train the whole time and the car thing doesn't make much sense. It reminds me of an old Eastern European story about a kindly but simple merchant who carries his goods on his lap in his cart, so as not to overburden his poor old horse pulling the cart along.
As to dawa's idea, it matches perfectly Isaac Asimov's conception of a future New York subway system in his novel 'The Caves of Steel', with gradually faster bands on the station platform leading to a continously running subway train.
I think that starting and stopping time is only a major problem in an urban subway system(where it consumes much of the relative time because of the short distance between stops), but not in long-range rail.
How about a train onto which you can drive your car for traveling in congested corridors, like NYC to Boston or Washington? (I think this idea has been tried. But maybe higher gas prices and congestion would make it more attractive now.)