proof that most of the time you should just build the damn trains

6:48 I legit laughed at "Buses yearn for the rails"

It's not for cheaper costs. It's to keep scaling back projects, until effectively there is no project. Because fancy buses can still use normal roads, so that's what they'll do

My experience has been that most of the Brisbane Metro dunking was more on the city council's stubborn refusal to admit that the thing was "just" a bus

Still a bus

I dunno, I disagree on the economics. I calculated the costs from the publicly-available state budgets of the state that I lived in, and found that a mile of road was noticeably more expensive to not just build, but also maintain, than a mile of rail. Yes, a meter of rail is more expensive, but the majority of train right of way is just... large-diameter gravel. Asphalt, on the other hand, is now made with increasingly more complex chemical additives (usually derived from coal). Rail also needs replacement less than half as often as asphalt, with roads requiring resurfacing every 15-20 years or so, as opposed to concrete-embedded rail, which can last for upwards of 50. And, on top of it all, roads are much wider than equivalent rail rights of way, meaning more material and land cost per length. Mass per mass, roads are cheaper, but *length per length*, they are not. A lot of this nuance is lost because the cost of bus infrastructure (aka, roads) is deceptively financed into the roadway column, because god forbid a pickup truck owner not have the right to run over kids on every neighborhood right of way. In fact, in the States, most BRT projects are actually car driver improvement projects with a paper-thin greenwashing pasted over them. And I haven't even touched on the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway yet. You also mention how it's unrealistic for a city to kneecap their finances by biting the bullet up front. To that, I say, I agree, it's unrealistic for them to go bankrupt on needlessly complicated and expensive systems of marginal benefit; thus, it's time for cities to stop spending all money on roads and road maintenance, and instead divert every penny of car-based spending to trains and bicycles instead. It's just not fiscally responsible to subsidize cars or busses with tax dollars; let the private market take care of that (but only after paying for California levels of environmental study, of course). In sum, cars are unwoke; bus infrastructure looks suspiciously like car infrastructure; and, thus, by way of the transitive principle, busses are unwoke.

Cries in Brisbane "Metro"

0:35 Wouldn't that just be a double-articulated (trolley)bus?

There are two other questions, the first is about accidents, Trams can get into accidents but bus far more, simply because buses are more often mixed with car, whereas trams more often have their dedicated track. But besides that, longevity. A good steel-on-steel rolling stock should last about 30 years, or more, like 50. The Parision metro runs MF67, a steel-on-steel rolling stock from the 1967, and it still works. But even more impressive, the **MP59**, from 1959! A rubber whel metro, so, yeah, pneumatic metros can last, so will this trackless tram do that, or will they just end up being cheap mass produced vehicles or will they actually last 60 years and more and be a viable investment? Because in anything-rail, you also look at that, can it last 50 years?
Another thing is that the Paris pneumatic subway runs on steel tracks, that's probably something interesting to keep in mind, a bit like many people movers and VAL like CDG, Lille, etc. They also get their own dedicated track and that does allow them to have more grip, better accelerations and decelerations, at a slightly lesser track wear, for an increased tire wear which is significantly cheaper, ontop of the fact that gradients almost don't matter then... So that's another thing to consider.

Rubber tires cushion the ride. The rough ride is all due to the asphalt.
Rough asphalt is caused by running vehicles with heavy axle weights, such as buses. This is why you can tell which lane the buses run on because of the condition of the road surface.

One thing I've noticed with CRRC buses is that they have enormous wheel wells to the point that some of their offerings are literally 30% dead space
And I suspect a similar thing applies to the "trackless tram" - except worse, because on a typical 12m long bus you'll have 2 axles (3 if your axle load limits are very restrictive). The rear axle(s) go under the high floor area of the bus so only the front axle is eating up capacity
But on a 3 segment trackless tram you will have 6 axles, and you can't shove the axles under a high floor area, so all 6 axles have wheel wells protruding into the cabin space, which is pretty terrible for capacity.

Trackless trams could work in countries with wide straight roads like China (and UAE?), but they're questionable in other countries.

That is just tramwashing

So, next HESS product: 4/5 section trolleys branded LightTrain… Or we get the Lyon line C for VBZ up to ETH Hönggerberg…

'evolution leads to crab' is a meme with no basis in reality, fyi.

Grassy bus tracks do exist! Hasselt (Belgium) has them. Instead of building a normal concrete busway, they built 2 (still wide) strips of concrete with a half a metre gap in the middle that you basically do not need to drive on anyway (outside of intersections and stop areas). Oh btw, they are calling the planned articulated busses there "trambus" because it was actually supposed to be a tram project that got downscaled to a bus... But a nice busway is still better than a boring one or none at all

A trackless tram ?
A double-bending Bus !
Like the Hess Light Tram…

still not  fixed the traffic problem in brisane for the busses tho lol

Rutting of asphalt using automated guidance systems can actually be solved with software. Much like pantograph wires  move back and forth to not wear out one rut on the pantograph, you engineer the guidance software to slightly vary the path each bus takes randomly so they dont always ride on the exact same piece of road.

what if the trackless trams were electric and used overhead wires to create a bit of permanence