Six years ago we showed the crazy Chinese 3D fast bus and everyone thought it was silly vaporware. Three years ago we showed an updated version, the Land Airbus which got to the animated video stage. Now it appears that it is at the model stage, zipping through the International High-tech Expo in Beijing the other day.
At 60 Km/hr It's not quite as fast as a hyperloop, but it holds 1400 passengers in comfort as it zips down the highway, and it is really designed as urban transport. Designer Song Youzhou says it will save a lot of road space, costing only 15% what a subway costs but serving pretty much the same function. It can also be built much more quickly. Given that it has the capacity of 40 buses, it will significantly reduce pollution and carbon dioxide emissions.
It will work wonderfully if drivers stay neatly within their lanes and never block the box at intersections.
Related Stories
previously: Straddle Bus 'Eats' Cars As it Speeds Down the Highway
Shanghaiist reports that an example of the TEB-1 (Transit Elevated Bus) has been built and has been tested on a 300 m track. The bus is of an unusual design: 7.8 m wide, its wheels rest both sides of a road, with the main part of the body high above street level so that other traffic can pass beneath. It is electrically powered. Passengers enter and leave via raised platforms. Its capacity is variously reported as 300 or 1200 passengers.
additional coverage:
- TechCrunch
- official news agency Xinhua
- Washington Post
- video by Descubre tu Mundo
- video by ELive Now
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @02:02PM
how tight can curves get before it collapses? and how will it handle cars driving into the "walls"? because that will happen.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @02:18PM
It's not built yet, but this thing looks like it will be pretty massive. Cars driving into the "walls" will probably cause almost no discomfort for the people in the straddle bus, but significant discomfort for the people driving the car. It's unlikely the drivers will want to repeat the experience.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @03:08PM
I suggest that we equip the bus with this [wikipedia.org]. After all, this is urban warfare. If you've driven in any US city, you know this to be true.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by wonkey_monkey on Wednesday May 25 2016, @02:10PM
everyone thought it was silly vaporware.
Now it appears that it is at the model stage
Those two things are in no way mutually exclusive.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Wednesday May 25 2016, @02:16PM
That looks like an interesting idea, but the roads it would run on would have to be specifically designed to handle it.
That would never work around here where roads just sort of evolved and wind around all over the place and constantly gain/lose lanes and otherwise become spaghetti.
They would also have to control the maximum height of vehicles on the road, and overpasses would already have to be high enough to accommodate this thing. That would more less mean industrial over sized loads would have to be banned on these roads.
(Score: 2) by tonyPick on Wednesday May 25 2016, @02:38PM
From TFA it looks like the design constraints for size have been chosen to fit existing major Highways in China
Might also work on pieces of somewhere like the UK Motorway network, and it'd be interesting to compare the cost of a retrofit along those lines to something like the (currently £50+ billion?) HS2 project in the UK.
I suspect the biggest problem is existing traffic turning across and blocking the rail paths though - unless you provide tunnelling for on & offramps the chances that those will clog up seem pretty high, and the video seems to indicate they want to require priority around turning arcs & junctions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @07:28PM
3 words: Mobile car crushers.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by DeathElk on Thursday May 26 2016, @02:48AM
3 words: Mobile car crushers.
It's about time.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday May 25 2016, @02:39PM
I think the best way to think of it is as a streetcar that doesn't have a designated lane. So you'll have the same issues with this straddling bus as you would with streetcars, which is that cars will constantly block its progress.
The other issues, like roads that wind all over the place, are no obstacle in mainland China. The government has no problem bulldozing neighborhoods that have stood for 2000 years to make a nice, neat, straight line 12-lane highway. They are communists, after all.
The main issue seems to be getting more use out of the existing right-of-ways. That's a fine idea, but it's also one that's been solved better before, elsewhere. The elevated trains in Chicago, for example, do that very thing. There are other permutations like the monorail in Sydney. Those don't require the huge expenditure that the excavation for a subway does, and it eliminates car/train conflicts by design. Those are not perfect, either. I found the screech of the L in Chicago grating; but others I've known whose apartments are right next to the tracks have told me after the second month living there they didn't notice the noise anymore.
Anyway I've seen traffic in China. To call it "chaotic" would be a euphemism. Gridlock never unlocks unless soldiers start pointing automatic weapons at drivers.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @07:34PM
It seems that you have misspelled "Totalitarians".
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by DeathElk on Thursday May 26 2016, @02:51AM
Sorry dude, the monorail in Sydney is no more... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Monorail [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday May 26 2016, @02:59PM
That is a shame. It was my favorite thing in Sydney after the ferries running out of Circular Quay.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @02:46PM
Or they could just drive behind it, or use the other lane...
Changing the overpasses would be much much easier than building the subway that this is supposed to replace.
All that said, it's a ridiculous idea. If you have ever seen traffic in a Chinese city you will already know that this idea will never work.
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday May 25 2016, @02:50PM
I have heard that you are supposed to stay under 13ft in North America, which is less than 2m ( about 7ft).
I suspect that this concept is also supposed to be at the 13ft limit, but will not interact well with heavy transport trucks/lorries.
It may work well for roads where trucks are restricted.
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday May 25 2016, @07:28PM
Correction: 7ft is less than 13'6", not the other way around.
I blame lack of coffee.
I also suspect the general hight restriction for trucks may be metric at 4m.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday May 26 2016, @03:57PM
I really don't see why that would be a problem. It's not like a bridge or tunnel that's fixed in place -- the thing moves. If you can't fit under it, just wait a minute until it gets out of your way. So they don't really need to restrict trucks or ensure every possible vehicle fits under it...they just have to make sure most vehicles can.
You could even hang a traffic light off the back of the thing with a range sensor so it'll go red if it detects a vehicle that won't fit.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @04:48PM
Related entertainment: 11foot8.com [11foot8.com] Watch the height!
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @08:44PM
I've mentioned that my hometown had a section of the Interstate missing and that superhighway traffic was routed through the business district on a lesser road.
That stretch of road had a very old bridge (an underpass) that wasn't Interstate-spec.
The traffic guys did the flashing lights thing there as well.
When that still failed to get the attention of some truckers, our guys added something.
About a quarter mile before the bridge, they strung a series of heavy-gauge pipes about a foot apart and dangling at the height of the bridge's clearance.
Inattentive truckers would still get an audible THUMP and the semi trailer would get some dents but the underpass/lane wasn't ever out of service again after that.
...though there were some pretty dramatic skid marks on that section of road.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 26 2016, @02:20AM
Now that is smart. They should let the 11foot8 people know. :)
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday May 25 2016, @02:25PM
The summary didn't help much either.
3D fast bus
As opposed to buses that are...what, 2D? 4D?
37 mph is considered "fast" compared to normal buses in congested city traffic, apparently.
land airbus
This term makes no sense at all. Are there any buses that *don't* drive on land? And why "airbus"? Because cars can drive under it? I'd prefer a more concrete term like "overhead bus."
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday May 25 2016, @02:27PM
It is hard to figure out how cars switch lanes given that there are the rails for this on either side, but the video does show it going through intersections so perhaps the rails are like streetcar tracks, integrated into the pavement.
Oh. So it's not a bus at all; it's a train. Well then.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday May 25 2016, @03:49PM
"Double wide routemaster"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Routemaster [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1) by jamestrexx on Wednesday May 25 2016, @04:02PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @05:58PM
A 3D vehicle is a vehicle that is more than 8 feet tall. Basically, if you are driving something and actually have to give it some thought as to how tall it is, it is a 3D vehicle. There are efforts, however to increase those requirements. For example, the interstate system isn't 3D until you get in the neighborhood of 12 or 13 feet.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday May 25 2016, @06:43PM
Please tell me the official term to refer to this class of vehicles isn't "3D."
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday May 25 2016, @07:30PM
I believe the official term is "oversized"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @07:55PM
That is the term that civil and traffic engineers use (at least around here) because you can't just think of them as flat in your two-denominational layout. The correct term is "oversized" but that is also used to refer to vehicles with oversized loads for the interstate system, which can be even bigger. For example, there is a famous 11 foot, 8 inch bridge and anything over six inches less than that is "oversized" for the bridge but may not be oversized for the interstate system. Additionally, "oversized" could be due to other road parameters other than height, but that isn't a concern for 3D analysis because other diversions could be allowed and are explicitly analyzed later.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday May 26 2016, @08:19PM
I thought the speed of a bus was measured in hz.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Wednesday May 25 2016, @02:27PM
there is no way that this thing can be safe. it's just splitting a four lane road in two at some points which is super dangerous because it only takes one fool to not see the train coming up behind them for this thing to derail. it's either vaporware or a literal trainwreck waiting to happen.
(Score: 2) by snick on Wednesday May 25 2016, @02:29PM
2 meters isn't very tall.
Go google for images of overhight cars vs low overpasses. Now, imagine that the overpass is moving at 60 Km/hr.
Hilarity will ensue.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @02:30PM
how did a site thats only 2 years old show this to us 6 years ago?
unless this is nothing more than an article scraped from /. just like every other article posted on here a day after /. posts it.
(Score: 3, Touché) by AndyTheAbsurd on Wednesday May 25 2016, @02:35PM
Pay attention, fool. The "six years ago" part is in a quote from the source, which is treehugger.com. Treehugger.com is definitely more than six years old.
Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @02:36PM
The quote about 6 years ago comes directly from TFA. There are 3 articles linked from the summary: the oldest is from 6 years ago (when they first showed us this design).
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday May 25 2016, @03:34PM
A proper attribution line would have prevented the confusion.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @09:01PM
The submitters who do as I do and spell out the source of the blockquoted text have gotten you guys fat and lazy.
Apparently, hovering over the links in TFS is way too much work for some.
...and just forget RTFA, of course.
.
Old joke
A dad is minding a cranky baby who is throwing his toys.
Bachelor: That baby is so spoiled.
Dad: No, they all smell that way.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday May 26 2016, @05:21AM
Hovering over one of the links in the quoted text tells you where that specific link leads to. It does not tell you from which, if any, of those linked pages the text is quoted.
And what do you do on a system where hovering over links is not possible? It certainly isn't on lynx, I'm pretty sure it isn't on my ebook reader's browser, and I'm not sure it is on smart phone browsers (the latter I can't tell for sure as I don't own a smartphone).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 26 2016, @06:00AM
hovering over links is not possible [...] on lynx [...] ebook reader [...] smart phone
True, true, and true.
That leaves RTFA.
Crazy? Yeah, I know.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by PocketSizeSUn on Wednesday May 25 2016, @03:47PM
This is just a bad idea going nowhere ... slowly.
This seems to be targeted to the current elevated highway systems in the large cities in China. These elevated expressways are supposed to be for car traffic only. The buses, bikes and trucks are supposed to run through the non-elevated area.
The obvious problems have already been noted, adding crazy height restrictions onto existing infrastructure is always a non-starter, after all the *primary* purpose for the infrastructure outside the city is to move cargo from the interior of the country to the ports and to facilitate trade and commerce. So as a city-city option it fails as it cannot co-exist with other transport, and it is also significantly slower that the other options of rail or conventional bus (and fight on some routes).
Within the city the primary people movers are buses, subways, and cars which co-exist on that the same infrastructure with trucks that brings supplies into the city. So the idea that this can function as a replacement for a subway with dramatic cost savings is by essentially stealing the infrastructure from the existing trucks and buses seems a bit short sighted.
In essence this really just a fancy light rail alternative that seems futuristic but really just brings a lot of new pointless restrictions.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday May 25 2016, @03:57PM
Something I don't understand about trains is its construction season here and any random bubba with some construction barrels and a shovel can reroute traffic around his project, cars are incredibly resilient. On the other hand they're replacing a storm drain at work and instead of a barrel or two, an incredibly brittle train would need to shut down service to the entire line until the drain replacement is finished. Bubba with a shovel can route car traffic around a hole, but it takes more than a shovel to kick rail lines a few feet over.
The next thing I don't understand is scalability. Our local train service has to order special cars from the other side of the planet in Spain and in a couple years they arrive by ship and rail. On the other hand the local city bus service is COTS and if there were an accident they'd be up and running in about a week on a new bus. Furthermore the train coaches being custom and hand made in very small quantities mean they're incredibly expensive. It would be cheaper to buy each train rider a new bus of their own than to make them share a new train. Operationally wouldn't it be enormously more effective to pay people a bribe not to travel to keep peak loads down while packing traditional buses? It seems like a design made by a megalomaniac.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday May 25 2016, @04:46PM
You seem to be ignoring or side-stepping some important points:
- There are already Bubbas having to deal with repairs in major cities with tramways. There's a process, which typically involves the word "night", and repairs do get done.
- The immediate cost gets amortized over decades or reduced traffic (and reduced road maintenance). Per your logic, there shouldn't have been an intercontinental US railway, because it was easier and faster to give all pioneers a new wagon and two horses.
- People do need to travel, and buses are stuck in the endless traffic jams. Growing countries are trying to ramp up infrastructure faster than they get new people in their cities, because when 6 rings of 12-lane highways isn't enough, you don't just blindly build ring 7. The answer has always been public transport with its own track.
For the people above bitching about height clearance: Major cities need a few roads with really high air draft, for exceptional convoys carrying special loads. That bus can use these kind of roads, and when a convoy taller than your usual truck has to come in, just do it in the middle of the night when the bus doesn't need to run as frequently.
This thing is silly, but it's not as absurd as the Solylentils seem to think.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday May 25 2016, @05:32PM
repairs do get done
At staggering expense and inconvenience compared to just plop down an orange barrel and cars drive around it
intercontinental US railway
That's mix n match. I like amtrak and "100 miles in 90 minutes" commuter trains, that's awesome. I'm just not seeing it as a sensible last mile service, like this is how you get to the front door at work or whatever. I'm not sure what the purpose of the thing really is, since you're gonna need trains for cargo and passengers anyway. I guess getting extremely american specific we like to build our airports 20 miles out in the middle of nowhere, now you need a service from downtown to the airport. And I've never lived in a metro area without that being the train, along with bus and taxi and cars, but whatever. I guess its for cities that never had an airport or trains and suddenly "airport!" and now they need transit.
The answer has always been public transport with its own track.
Unfortunately for the ambitions of the linked article, I think that remains the case.
when a convoy taller than your usual truck has to come in
Just drive at the same speed as the truck till its outta your way. You're gonna need automated cams and radar avoidance anyway. I assure you from working in the telecom business that "every month" in every large city there's an incident involving aerial fiber and taller than usual construction trucks or whatever. Boom left up while moving around the block, sometimes an accident, sometimes the drivers are just dumb, whatever. There are of course huge legal arguments over sagging fiber and improper installation vs permits and legal maximums. "Well you know before the city rebuilt that road, the fiber was 16 feet up, but after the city filled in that depression and flattened out the road, now its only 11 feet up and nobody told the telco to move up so we drove our 12 foot tall crane on a road legally documented as required to pass 15 foot traffic and sure we hit a few tree branches as expected but we donno nuthin about no fiber...."
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday May 25 2016, @06:41PM
The answer to all this, for commuting passengers at least, is SkyTran [wikipedia.org] PRT. It avoids conflicts with existing roads because it uses elevated rails suspended from utility poles. It's cheap to build because it uses pre-fab parts made in factories and presumably would use many millions of cars, so economies of scale would work in its favor. It saves energy because it's efficient (two hairdryers' worth of electricity to run a 2-person car at 100mph), and lets us convert more of our transit to electric sources which can come from renewables. And it increases transit efficiency immensely because it's so fast (100-150mph, without having to stop for intersections).
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday May 25 2016, @07:16PM
that is pretty cool. although
Malewicki conceived the basic idea of SkyTran in 1990
It looks like either he or the artist watched Star Trek the Motion Picture back in 1979.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Wednesday May 25 2016, @07:41PM
PRT is not a new concept by any means. West Virginia University built an early sorta-PRT system back in the 70s that still operates today. (It's not quite "personal" as each car holds 6 people IIRC, and it's rather slow, but it's a product of the 70s.) I'm sure various sci-fi books and movies have shown similar things. Remember "Logan's Run"? That showed something similar and that movie came out in the early/mid 70s.
It's not uncommon for sci-fi to come up with ideas for things long, long before they become reality. The tablet computer is a good example of this: they showed something like that in 2001: A Space Odyssey. There's an old demonstration video from the mid-60s showing the idea of online shopping and reading news on the internet.
What Malewicki likely conceived in 1990 wasn't just the general idea of PRT, but a more fleshed-out idea of how it'd work on a technical level: suspended rails with maglev, cars controlled by a centralized computer system, cars available on-demand, rails arranged in some kind of grid, with cars being able to navigate the grid autonomously between any two arbitrary points without having to stop at stations in-between, etc. From there they would have had to do engineering analysis and preliminary design work, like determining how large the cars would be and how heavy, how fast they could travel, how heavy the track needs to be to support the cars, how much it'll cost, how much power it'll use, what safety factors are feasible, etc. You don't get that level of detail from sci-fi, just the general idea, which may or may not be feasible as shown. Also remember that a lot of the technologies needed to make SkyTran work didn't exist in the 70s, and weren't really that well developed in the 90s either. Maglev inductrack rails didn't exist back then (and are still pretty new now, but at least they've been built and proven), they didn't have computers powerful enough to run such a large automated system and also able to provide the autonomous services in each car, we have better technology to build the cars light enough (like with carbon fibre), we have much better computer modeling technology for design work, etc. The whole thing is completely feasible if it'd just get enough funding from the stupid governments that are happy to pour billions into horribly inefficient and slow light rail systems. Today's automated cars (Tesla Autopilot, Google's test cars) are already proving that having humans piloting high-speed vehicles is not only unnecessary but also stupid and dangerous, and that automated driving is very feasible, but with SkyTran the problem is far, far simpler since it's confined to its overhead rail system. SkyTran doesn't have to worry much about swerving to avoid a deer or some kid that runs into the street (though it'll certainly have vision systems to automatically brake if some obstacle somehow does appear, but in a system with rails suspended 20-30 feet off the ground it's hard to imagine this being a big problem; I think birds will be the main problem as far as obstacles go). SkyTran doesn't have to worry about navigating around road construction. And SkyTran doesn't have to worry about interacting with human-piloted vehicles, since it's isolated on its own system with only other SkyTran vehicles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 26 2016, @02:16AM
Before Skytran there was Urbmobile -- bi-modal -- rails/guideways for long haul, short range battery-electric for the local drive on either end of a trip (a few miles at each end). See for example, http://www.popsci.com/cars-drive-themselves-could-make-commutes-awesome [popsci.com]
Or Google Books has the original Popular Science full article from 1967 (link is very long...)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2016, @06:44PM
You go out at night, eatin' cars
You eat Cadillacs, Lincolns too
Mercury's and Subaru's
And you don't stop, you keep on eatin' cars
(Score: 1) by DeathElk on Thursday May 26 2016, @03:08AM
Mmm Mm, crunchy.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Wednesday May 25 2016, @07:19PM
It will work wonderfully if drivers stay neatly within their lanes and never block the box at intersections.
Just fix some rotary saw blades to the front struts. That'll do the trick.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 26 2016, @04:20AM
Seems like a problem with quoting!