Can anyone provide some analysis / urban planning snobbishness? What are the disadvantages? Off hand it looks scary to drive under / around. Unlike a bus, one accident can cause the entire line to get backed up. You could say the same thing about subways, but subways can't get into car accidents in the first place.
Furthermore it can only run in places that have wide four lane roads (2 in each direction) to begin with. There's not that many appealing residential places next to loud, busy roads. Is it possible to build practical commuter routes serviced by this type of vehicle?
Of course I'm not a total cynic. If the problems could be hammered out then it will be quick like a subway (no traffic) but much less expensive. I'm curious to see how this experiment pans out.
Qinhuangdao isn't a very large city. About 1-2 million people probably in the urban area, so for China it's quite small. It is China's prime port for coal. It is pretty wealthy.
Northern Chinese cities are high-rise, especially in areas of change or economic development. A block consists several towers, often 20-40 stories high. Entrances are not road-side but elevated 3-5 levels up. The bottom 3-5 levels are used for shopping centers, gyms; leisure and retain. Paring in 1-3 levels of basement carpark. Complexes are build with 6-8 lane roads separating them into blocks or blocks of blocks. It is very grid like, and very high density.
IIRC, the proponent of this elevated bus is in the local Qinhuangdao government. That creates will where there's a way. Given city planning, they're build for something like this. I'd well expect alightment points to be elevated leading directly into the 2nd floor of the nearby complex.
The solution seems to be built for the environment it exists in, which is modern suburbs and development areas of Chinese cities that have developed very very quickly over the past decade. Everyone has a car. Traffic can be unbearable.
I doubt this will be adopted in Shanghai, Beijing, etc, as they developed while with wide roads, not with roads wide enough. This works in the younger developed places.
Some not small thing to add: Solar cells and batteries. A wide flat surface area, and the fact whenever I get on to a bus it is electric powered, creates this as a great proving platform for self-sustained mass-transit vehicles. This is double++ for urban transit in China.
When I visited Shanghai a couple of years ago, I was taught to never, ever look directly at a car as the driver would take that as a "you've seen me, I can go first"-signal. Instead i was supposed to only sneak peeks at the traffic, never let them know I saw them coming, which would make them stop. I was only there for about three weeks so i can't really testify for the long term effectiveness, but at least I'm still here to share that anecdata, so there's something at least. :-)
I ran into this situation with a driverless car at an intersection in Mountain View. It got me all confused. The car too .. it slowed because it was unsure I was getting into the crosswalk or not. Quite a corner case.
Similarly in Moscow I was told when changing the line I should never look that other cars show any indication that they would yield. I should just blink for some seconds and then go. Then I should trust that other drivers want to avoid collisions and yield.
It worked while I have been there for 9 months in 2009, but it never become emotionless instinct to drive like that.
It's common in (at least portions of) the US as well. I think this was just a case of it being somewhat ambiguous, since we are also talking about vision.
Interesting, I didn't have that experience in Shanghai at all. When did you go? I was there in 2005 and 2009.
When I visited Chongqing on the other hand...
I was there 2008, stayed on DongZhuAnBang Road. Somewhat near the Bund, if I remember correctly. I got the instruction from a Swedish expat who had lived there for three years or so.
(a) Cars do obey traffic lights, at least in Shanghai and Beijing. Perhaps you're talking about 10 years ago, or in tier 2/3/4 cities.
(d) People do pay attention when they cross the road. You have to, because cars can turn right at a red light and, even though they're meant to yield to pedestrians, they don't.
(c) Creating an additional lane is rare in big cities.
I'm not saying this idea is workable, but the points you make don't seem the most pressing.
> (a) Cars do obey traffic lights, at least in Shanghai and Beijing. Perhaps you're talking about 10 years ago, or in tier 2/3/4 cities
Most of the time? More so in Shanghai than Beijing, I still see cars doing very crazy things on a daily basis. I mean, what cop is going to dare and pull over a Black Audi?
> (d) People do pay attention when they cross the road. You have to, because cars can turn right at a red light and, even though they're meant to yield to pedestrians, they don't.
Most do, but after seeing a couple of cyclists hit and (probably) killed as they just blew through a red light, well, some obviously don't.
> (c) Creating an additional lane is rare in big cities.
Heck, 25% of the lanes in Beijing are being used for illegal parking, the scooters just spill out anywhere. Anyways, these buses I assume would only travel on very well regulated roads (if at all, this bus has been vapor for more than a few years now).
Some lights have cameras, not all, many drives know the ones that do and don't. Also, the black Audis don't care if they get caught on camera, they are basically immune to punishment. I see a few WTFs a day, still.
I wish abiut the seatbelts. Almost every single taxi I've been in for the last few years has them hidden under the back seat where they aren't usable. We have to take a zhuan Che just to get them for ourselves, and the the driver is never wearing. Any kind of enforcement in Beijing has a short attention span, they might do seatbelts once a year at a few locations, it isn't enough to form any kind of deterrent.
Beijing is a government city, so lots of national and provincial officials floating around, their car of choice seems to be a black Audi, but they seem to be branching out into BMWs, Mercedes, and even land rovers. You can tell who they are by how many traffic rules they ignore, but the police typically don't bother enforcing anything on anyone unless they are in special campaign mode.
Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou are better. Heck, even Kunming and hangzhou are better than Beijing, given there aren't so many officials in these cities.
Diplomat black plates are rare though, and they don't seem to drive aggressively, even if they have diplomatic immunity. Saw Hilary's SUV once around the American embassy, weird that they didn't bother blocking traffic or anything.
When I was in Beijing, every bus I travelled in (OK, that was 3 or 4 of them, so anecdotal evidence) had seatbelts installed in a position such that they where physically unusable.
I find it a rather funny thing, why do they do that? I mean, if they are required to install seatbelts and they actually buy and install them, doesn't it cost the same to place them, you know, in their proper place?
No one uses seatbelts, so no one cares, so they just bury them to make it easier to put on the seat cover that isn't really designed for seatbelts with only nominal holes for show.
You're refuting points that I didn't actually make!
On (a), I said cars obey traffic lights. I didn't say they don't do other crazy things.
On (d), I said people look when they're crossing the road. I wasn't talking about cyclists going through an intersection. That's not what 'crossing the road' means in every day speech.
On (c), I was talking about creating an additional lane. I wasn't talking about illegally blocking an existing lane.
I see cars routinely not obey traffic lights, which is one of hose crazy things. The only reason it has gone down at all is because of the cameras, but you'll still see it happen on a daily basis.
People don't look when they are crossing, they just go. I have to warn the driver to be careful at such intersection because there is always some old guy or gal crossing. The bikes are much more dangerous, as the cars are expected to, and can, just go around the pedestrians who don't give a f*ck about the light, but the bikes are always surprises.
Beijing used to have lots of bike lanes. Technically it still does, but it is all being used for parking. The four lane roads on either side of my apartment are effectively one lane roads since parking enforcement is non existent.
China is a corrupt country where officials will use/abuse their positionsagainst police who pick trouble with them. Black Audi is the stereotypical official car of choice.
I wonder how many people that are not in government specifically buy black Audis in that city to take advantage of this. It's actually possible (although unlikely) that much of the bad behavior is from pretenders.
I think Black Audi means nothing these days.
I would partially agree with your first sentience if it's 10 years ago and in small city. But today in big cities, definitely no.
(a) Cars do obey traffic lights most of the time, at least in Shenzhen as of November/December 2015, when I was living there.
And the GP's point (c) is spot on:
> c.) scooters are everywhere. and they ignore lights/lane
To elaborate - scooters and electric rickshaws basically ignore traffic laws altogether. Driving against traffic is basically their value proposition; that's what you use them for if you're brave enough to drive one / be driven in it. I've both been driven in one against traffic on the main road, and seen them passing us by, going in the wrong direction, when I was going to work by a cab.
Basically, traffic in (Shenzhen,) China looks scary and chaotic at first, but one can get used to it.
> (d) People do pay attention when they cross the road. You have to, because cars can turn right at a red light and, even though they're meant to yield to pedestrians, they don't.
How much space does it actually save? The two sides probably add up to as much volume as a conventional tram line. If you made an ordinary double-deck tram the same length the capacity for the same "footprint" would be not a whole lot less, and it would probably be more stable - therefore able to go faster.
How much space do the stations take up? Those elevated platforms have got to be more expensive than a tram stop, and they won't be accessible without space-consuming ramps and/or expensive lifts that require maintenance. Speaking of which, how do passengers safely move from station to "bus" at that height? At a minimum you're talking about deploying ramps or similar, which will make the stops take longer. And what about away from stops? In my part of western Europe all new public transport is legally required to have disabled-accessible evacuation facilities through the whole length of its route - if this thing got into a crash, how do even able-bodied passengers get out?
How's it getting its power? I don't see any overhead wires but I do see some kind of tracks under the wheels, so we're probably talking about live electricity in the roadway. That's dangerous, and prone to getting shorted out by road debris or the like.
The thing can only run above ordinary cars - a lorry in either lane blocks it - so I'm not sure it will actually be able to travel that much faster than a conventional tram. If you're willing to restrict the road to standard-height cars, a monorail suspended over the roadway would offer better stability (so higher speed) and safer power supply (though it still has the evacuation issues).
>A monorail suspended over the roadway would offer better stability
Building elevated rail infrastructure is very expensive though. The material required to build infrastructure supporting a "tall bus" is substantially less. Furthermore, the bus doesn't contribute to visual pollution quite as much.
It might be slower than a train, but it's certainly faster than a normal bus. There are a few places I think this idea would be extremely helpful in Chicago. Our road system is a very regular grid, with major streets every 8 blocks, and semi-major streets every 4, both of which are signaled. Bus stops are usually at these intersections. These intersections are also the places where people are most likely to want to turn.
If you banned left turns outside of signaled intersections on these bus routes, and the bus stopped on the near side of every intersection, you wouldn't run the risk of the bus overtaking cars and hitting them. Instead, the bus would get a signal to move first, and cars could proceed afterwards.
Some of the slowest buses in Chicago are on routes that aren't served by trains. Trains only go to and from the central business district, and so you need to either take a bus or drive to go anywhere else. The immense volume of car traffic also slows down the buses, some of which are barely faster than walking speed. I used to live 4 miles from my job, but taking a bus would have taken over an hour. That is the time with a single transfer, 10 minute headways, and a bus stop in front of my apartment and a bus stop in front of my office.
I didn't see numbers, but the two sides looks like they'd only be about as wide as a car lane, so not as wide as a tram lane, and the vehicule is possibly higher capacity than a tram...
The biggest thing I see with this is you're now blocking both left and right turns while the vehicle is moving.
If you look at something like the 511 Spadina Streetcar in Toronto which runs on a right of way (ROW). You're in one of three states: the alternate direction of traffic is allowed to move, traffic going straight is allowed to move (including the streetcar), or cars are taking left turns.
Other LRTs and Streetcars either run on a ROW or they are on their own road without other modes of transit. Similar to portions of the Nice trams, and dozens of others.
LRTs and streetcars are generally running in the middle of the lane meaning that will only block left turns. But if you have a tram (they call it a bus, but that's stupid) that's required to be on the outside of traffic it would have to stop or slow down whenever a car is turning right. And when cars are taking a right turn, if there's not space on the road due to a back up, that tram will now be forced to stop since the car will be on top of the tracks.
Given the cost of building the infrastructure vs the time saved. I don't see how you're coming out any better than an LRT or BRT.
This is if it's in local traffic. I think a lot of these issues could be avoided on highways if you're able to fiddle with the design of off-ramps. Of course, that highway would need to be two lanes in each direction.
Disadvantages: what do you do with traffic signaling? You would either have to move traffic signals up and sideways five meters or so or make this bus a few meters higher, so that you can keep existing infrastructure.
Also: this thing being wider gives it about three times the floor area relative to a train, so it would require about thrice the number of doors to get passengers in and out efficiently. How do you do that while keeping it structurally safe? I guess the answer is that that spacious room inside would see a few walls added.
> Also: this thing being wider gives it about three times the floor area relative to a train, so it would require about thrice the number of doors to get passengers in and out efficiently. How do you do that while keeping it structurally safe? I guess the answer is that that spacious room inside would see a few walls added.
That thing has already twice more doors than a train since the doors of both sides can be used, so it partially solves that problem already.
The other issue is the type of door they're proposing. The video showed a large elevator being raised and lowered from an elevated platform. That seems unnecessarily slow and complicated, but there's no easy way to get passengers out of an elevated bus above traffic
> Also: this thing being wider gives it about three times the floor area relative to a train, so it would require about thrice the number of doors to get passengers in and out efficiently.
Not exactly. Longer stopping times are enough to get people off and on.
> How do you do that while keeping it structurally safe?
There are no possible structural issues. In fact, building this sort of bus is more trivial than a regular bus, as size and weight constraints aren't nearly as important as regular buses.
"Longer stopping times are enough to get people off and on"
They also may be enough to annoy people so much that they will avoid this like the plague. Extreme example: if this loads and unloads like an airplane and makes a stop every few miles. Yes, maybe only 5% of passengers would get out and in at every stop, but that still would be a one minute stop every two minutes or so.
And if there are no structural issues, why do trains have so few doors nowadays? I would think stops could be a lot shorter at peak hours of trains had more doors.
> Extreme example: if this loads and unloads like an airplane and makes a stop every few miles. Yes, maybe only 5% of passengers would get out and in at every stop, but that still would be a one minute stop every two minutes or so.
That's a good point. I'm sure the bus operators programmed the bus' route to make it at least as good as regular trains with regards to the basic performance metrics such as average operational speed.
> And if there are no structural issues, why do trains have so few doors nowadays?
In short, design options. If a railway operator felt a demand for passenger wagons with more doors and a reduced number of seats, it would be trivial to design one. There are downsides to this (less seats, more moving parts, more maintenance, potentially heavier wagon, harder ticket control, etc...) but nothing stops anyone from doing a passenger car with doors everywhere.
The picture you link to is probably exactly what the original author had in mind. It has mostly wooden bodywork and a metal subframe which in the event of a collision is given to riding up onto the carriage in front and killing everybody. They were literal death traps.
In practice there were half a dozen non-structural reasons to move to less doors including automatic doors being much safer, disabled accessibility and simply that those trains were cold.
> You could say the same thing about subways, but subways can't get into car accidents in the first place.
Trams can. But it still happens only rarely (at least in my home town. You can still fall back to normal buses in that case as a replacement until the crash is sorted and cleaned up.
Okay, story time. So a friend of mine is a tram driver. He fondly recalls the time when some idiot had parked across the tram line to go inside a store. Much use of the horn got said idiot out, but he didn't see the problem; "Why don't you just drive around me?" he shouted. My friend shouted back "Why don't you come up here and try that?" The idiot actually came up, sat down in the tram driver's seat, and then promptly deflated as he realised there is no steering wheel, a tram runs on tracks. He got up, with a very long face, and left to move his car to the tune of laughter from passengers and bystanders.
As a data point, my local (German) tram operator reports an accident rate of once per 30,000-70,000 vehicle-kilometers, depending on the line. The highest accident rates occur, of course, on lines passing through high-density areas with small roads.
Looks like an accident waiting to happen: someone tries to go under it and forgets that they have a bike on the roof or that their car is too high; the bus tries to drive over a car just as it makes a turn; the list goes on.
> There's not that many appealing residential places next to loud, busy roads.
Yes, yes there are. There are countless elevated highways through the middle Shanghai, I believe the highest is an intersection where the roads stacks five levels high - in the middle of the city.
Another question I have is whether this can accommodate all types of vehicles underneath it... from the image it seems like only compact cars would fit - so this excludes SUVs or larger trucks.
I disagree: Delivery trucks, city busses, school busses, tour busses, construction vehicle. All of those exist outside of the US/Canada and would likely not fit underneath the TEB.
Furthermore it can only run in places that have wide four lane roads (2 in each direction) to begin with. There's not that many appealing residential places next to loud, busy roads. Is it possible to build practical commuter routes serviced by this type of vehicle?
Of course I'm not a total cynic. If the problems could be hammered out then it will be quick like a subway (no traffic) but much less expensive. I'm curious to see how this experiment pans out.