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
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.
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?
Only if you get caught ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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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.
Fuvk it; still better than cars. The physics alone are an improvement.
This is the problem with running a channel where the algorithm just wants you to be against stuff for clicks. You become jaded and start to work against what you originally set out to do.
What if these got popular on a disused line and the local authority notices there are suddenly a few thousand people a day using these things just to get off the road. Maybe that's the start or a process to reinvest in a small service on that old line. Or if not, then it's still a bunch of people not driving.
Or they could just pack up the company, go home and moan on the Internet about the situation..
i mean, they can't work with a few thousand people. you'd need a few thousand pods, because they only take two people. and they can't turn around by themselves, or navigate switches (look at the wheel profile), so you need new infrastructure for that. and they say that you order them via an app but since they can't just go wherever you need to wait for a free track, so depending on where you are on the line you could need to wait for your ordered "pod" to navigate almost the entire system, waiting at stations behind other pods for who knows how long.
what's more, this idea isn't new: single-rail "gyrotrains" were invented in 1910, but never took off because of the extra mechanical complexity involved compared to jush using a normal train. and before you say "modern tech fixes that", the main problem was that gyroscopic precession would fling the cars off of corners. that's a physics problem which these pods appear to have solved by going extremely slow.
so, we have here a system that's vastly more expensive, complex and unreliable than scheduled rail bus service, proposed to fix the same problem as scheduled rail bus service. just buy a rail bus.
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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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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Can they just invent fucking human bubbles and we can adapt the logical already existent forms of public transport instead
I'm pretty sure this is just a way of utilizing abandoned rail lines that aren't fit for full size trains.
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.
Living not too far away from the place where the Moncocab is being developed and tested, I've actually had the chance to see them in person and actually sit in one (They are much more spacious than Adam makes them seem)
This system is not intended for mass transport. It is intended for rural places, connections between villages and small towns. A connection between bigger cities with these obviously makes no sense - for villages however these could be absolutely great.
Also, maybe this is worth mentioning. Monocab ain't a profit oriented company (yet). It is a project by the Technical University Ostwestfalen-Lippe in cooperation with some other universities.
I can see why people are sceptical - but really this is a proof of concept. maybe it'll turn out a flop - maybe it'll work great. I am willing to see where they take it.
I'd think a short, reversible, single-car tram (like Coventry's VLR) would work a hell of a lot better for connections between villages/small towns than Uber for rails with needlessly complicated gyroscopic bs.
Well, keep in mind we're talking about long single tracks spanning many villages and towns - in places where there is not a ton of demand. The train would: 1. Rarely be there in the moment somebody actually needs it 2. Almost always be empty.
Notice I said the monocab ain't meant as "mass" transport. You wont see 30 monocab back on back all the time - you'll see one, maybe, every half an hour or so - but they'll be there when somebody needs them - not uselessly when nobody cares.
These are much more, as somebody else already pointed out in the videos comments, I believe, indented to replace call busses - instead of having to call a bus and wait half an hour or more, you can just hop into a mobocab which is on standby and get moving.
you can just hop into a mobocab which is on standby and get moving
The train would: 1. Rarely be there in the moment somebody actually needs it 2. Almost always be empty.
The mobocabs won't actually be there when someone needs them, either. They're on rails. They're not going to just be hanging out somewhere in the middle of the line so they can show up in a couple of minutes, they'll be on standby at a trainshed on either end of the line. It's going to take like 30 minutes for one to arrive -- at that point you might as well just have a tram that comes every 30 minutes or so
And that's where you might have a misconception. As I said, I've seen them in real life before and had the opportunity to talk to some people working on them. As far as I understood, they will have stations. (I read your message as you assume they'll stop at any point on the track - they don't). They will stand by these stations and move along to make space for any subsequent monocab.
transport to other towns is generally not a spur of the moment thing. checking a timetable is a lot easier for people in rural villages than using an app. one train every two hours is the norm here, and they stop at villages of a few hundred people.
I live in a rural area - the main reason I often do not use public transport is the fact that it runs way too infrequently - and depending on the holidays of a neighboring state may run even less often. As much as I would love to use public transport, over here where I live, it often just doesn't fit. A quick trip somewhere would turn into a 4 hour journey.
Also, as I already commented under another comment, as far as I understood, the monocabs will be on stand-by at every station.(they might've changed that though, in which case I fully agree with you - an app is stupid)
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.
Glory be
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