They generally work. However if you go with standard and thus cheaper technology you can get more transit for the same money. Transit should be about getting people places not the interesting vehicels.
They generally aren't real proposals in the first place (see hyperloop). They're usually vaporware used to frustrate a real transit proposal, analogous to e.g. deflecting proposals to move to a memory safe language by saying that you're going to use a safe subset of C++ that's going to be defined and standardised real soon now.
Excep c++ is standard, we hake alot of it and plenty of people who know it. You have instead made the counter my arguement. Sometimes new is better and you need to move on. However the safe c++ subset (if it arrives and works as promised) might be better because we have all that c++ and rust doesn't interoperate with it well. (again rust would be better if we had it in 1970 but we didn't.)
Yes let us buy more city buses. Have 10 ton beasts destroying the streets while carrying on average 5 people in the slowest and most delayedway imaginable.
I don't think you meant for your comment to be so sarcastic. I live in the exurbs, not exactly the sticks, but on the outskirts of a major city and on the way to a significant medium-city city. I have seen pictures on English Russia, where there were catenary-powered tramways in what looked like Siberia in the 1950s or 1960s. I imagine how life would be here and now if there were two bus services at the nowhere stoplight near my house. One east-west, one north-south, running at convenient 15 minute intervals around the clock. It would be neat if there were a convenient ride to my workplace in the next city. I view riding the bus as having a chauffeur for $2.75. I saw some maps created by amateurs called Fantasy NYC Subway, where there were so many lines that they went up to double Greek letters. I have lived in NYC, and there is not even a one-seat train ride to the airport, nor always a taxi ride that does not have "trouble" with my debit card which goes away when I take a pic of his license. These monorails and suspended trains and such were done 100 years ago. People tried them. I have seen animes where the entire premise is about romance due to missed trains in nowhere places. For some reason none of these things happen in the United States.
A bus with 5 people is already better than a car and they often hold many more people for part of the trip. what buses need is management that isn't there as a cushy reward for politics but instead there for trasit. A well run bus is the suburbs should be seeing 50-60 riders per hour off peak (most for 10 minutes) but when you run a but as poorly as many cities do it is no wonder nobody rides.
That "five" people are people with disabilities but cannot afford the custom car, elderly people who can't see the road, blind people, people with random seizures, people who don't have a financially-stable parent that can guarantee their first car purchase or loan them the money for their first beater car, people who just got out of prison and can't apply for a loan, single mothers thrown out of her house without anything from her abusive husband.
If the bus-riding experience is as dreadful as you imagine, then surely the people that still decides to do so despite all this are at their most absolute desperation. And you want to take away their last lifeline?
People use what is available. If your only option is a shitty bus that comes delayed every 90 minutes, you will use it. It still does not make it an optimal option.
From supply chains we learned 1 thing. Multi-modal is the way. Have dirt cheap, high capacity main modes and have more expensive but more flexible last mile options.
So in public transportation this means few high capacity train lines, and at the stations mini-vans / cars, e-bikes, evtols to do the last mile, from/to the origin/destination door. You can do this because you can rely on the train schedule.
That is why so many are against gadgetbahns.