China has built an elevated bus that travels above car traffic
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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.
a.) cars don't follow traffic lights
b.) people create unofficial extra lanes
c.) scooters are everywhere. and they ignore lights/lanes
d.) people don't pay attention to traffic lights nor cars when they cross.
(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.
This directly contradicts your first point
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).
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.
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.
So traffic behavior has changed dramatically. People actuallywear seatbelts now! This is because they fine if you get caught even without a belt.
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.
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?
Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou are better. Heck, even Kunming and hangzhou are better than Beijing, given there aren't so many officials in these cities.
Literal immunity in most cases, attitude on top of that.
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.
It worked while I have been there for 9 months in 2009, but it never become emotionless instinct to drive like that.
In common Russian usage the word for "blink" also means indicate-a-turn-with-signal and that is what I meant.
They do, if these rules are enforced by a 40t vehicle that can crush them to death.
> b.) people create unofficial extra lanes
See a).
> c.) scooters are everywhere. and they ignore lights/lanes
Se a).
> d.) people don't pay attention to traffic lights nor cars when they cross.
See a).
Chinese drivers may be "bad", but they aren't idiots. Only one side is ever going to lose an argument with that thing.
If they're just premetros they can (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premetro)
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.
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.
This is only a possibility if those buses meet the height restrictions imposed by the elevated bus.
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.
Does anyone know the accident rate of cars?
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.
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.
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.
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.
In fact, this was already done in the past.
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.
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.
It could work on longer straight roads, no corners.
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).
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.
Are tram lanes in Europe larger than car lanes? Every streetcar I have seen in the US uses a standard car lane.
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.
You will struggle to find many members of the retail market using those in cities outside of america
Also, most of the times, the vehicles underneath this bus will be in a stand still or moving very slowly, hence reducing the chance of accidents.
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.
In terms of beating BRT, I guess it avoids the requirement of a busway?
http://humantransit.org/2016/05/the-chinese-straddle-bus-is-...
"…If your starting point for urban design is that single-occupant cars, despite their extreme inefficiency in using scarce urban space, should be allowed to go anywhere at all, and that the surface plane should be designed solely for their convenience to the exclusion of all other citizens and needs, then this technology makes sense.
Remember, the primary cost of transit infrastructure is the cost of keeping transit out of the way of motorists, on the assumption that motorists have the prior claim to absolutely every bit of public space in our cities."
The main challenge of this sort of project is to come up with a concept that's outside the proverbial box, and then sell the concept to public officials high enough in the regime's hierarchy to get them on board and have them sponsor the project to make it happen in the political level.
For such a bus to be able to circulate, traffic codes need to be adjusted, signaling must be tweaked, public roads need to meet stricter requirements, and the public needs to be educated. These are all political challenges.
Building the bus is the easy part.
The main reason why "the West" talk too much is because they talk about safety concerns, and actually tackle potential problems.
China doesn't, and when the proverbial shit hits the fan they simply try to cover up the result of their incompetence, too often even at the expense of human lives.
Case in point:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wenzhou_train_collision
Another reason why "the West" talk too much is because in "the West" projects need to have a sound business model, as there isn't a dictatorship that is able to throw piles of cash at problems just to save face and resorts to industrial levels of censorship to stop these problems from being discussed.
It's easy to have successes if you use force to silence anyone who dares point out any failure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valencia_Metro_derailment#Subs...
Spanish authorities didn't tried to censor the accident, nor did they tried to bury the wreckage with corpses and human remains still mangled within the wagons.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8658959...
> in which many more were killed
Honestly, with all the censorship forced by the chinese communist party regarding the accident, how can anyone really tell?
In fact, how many accidents have occurred since then that were successfully covered up?
All I'm saying is that your example doesn't make your case that Western governments are that much better at tackling these kinds of potential problems, or that they don't try to cover them up, often in ways that prevent the problem from being fixed.
If you want to argue that they have a train collision a month that we just don't know about, while I vehemently condemn censorship for itself, I can't accept lack of proof as proof that it happened!
It's zoned as residential property but that's not stopping anyone. In general, as long as you're not bothering anything no one cares about any regulations (again, on the small scale. If you you're big and have money and people want to fuck you over then there is no escaping it. On paper this is a socialist system and they have the laundry list of regulation to back it up).
He doesn't get permits to build walls, to put in a bar, to tear out half the place and put in something completely new. There is no health inspection, liquor license or firesafety inspection. It's basically, go rent a property, hire a bunch of people to do the manual labor, remodel and you're cookin'!
In a way the little guy has a leg up on all the commercial chains that do have to follow the rules
And everything in China kinda works like that. No months of planning, chasing investors, getting permits, getting licenses pussy-footing around and figuring out your supply chain. They just go and do it. It's the bootstrapper's dream.
Along the way some walls collapse and some people get food poisoning, but this place is changing at a astronomical rate. You can't contain it
Take a look at the reminescences of this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Gergel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Saxony-Anhalt_train_colli...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalfsen_train_crash
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Chester,_Pennsylvania,_tr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermalle-sous-Huy_train_collis...
Tens of millions of dead in each one.
Does your buddy not know anything about recent Chinese history? I guess I got taught it randomly in school (UK, happened to be on the History GCSE), so perhaps it's forgivable.
I recall seeing the model as well as concept videos more than five years ago. E.g.:
http://www.chinahush.com/2010/07/31/straddling-bus-a-cheaper...
Is this solution cheaper than elevated monorails? The clearance for traffic definitely is something which has the potential to cause problems of either high clearance vehicles misjudging or the bus misjudging as vehicles exchange position in traffic --you know there will be people pushing the clearance, so they should think about failsafes.
I'm guessing the advantage is that they only need the supports built for the length of the car, with other tracked vehicles it has to be built for the length of the route.
I'd imaging you'd just put up height restriction bars on all the roads entering the path.
Add in a sensor that checks the height of other transport around in case a car somehow got higher after passing a safety bar. ....
You'd reduce accidents to normal levels.
The Chinese would have thought of this on day one....
[edit] "To prevent traffic accidents, Mr. Song said guardrails would be constructed between the bus tracks and the car lanes that pass through the elevated bus. The rails would be able to absorb at least 70 percent of a collision’s impact to reduce damage to the bus and other vehicles. Lanes for the elevated bus would be limited to passenger vehicles no higher than 7.2 feet, and the buses are designed to meet zoning and bridge height regulations in each city."
Another issue is people trying to turn away from the lanes of the elevated bus as the bus approaches --thinking they can beat it, unless getting in and out of those lanes is restricted to a few well managed merge and exit areas.
Do people often sabotage train tracks? It seems similar.
In London, the buses are a real pain because they are slow (both in terms of how fast they can go and because they stop every couple of hundred of meters or so) and you often cant get around them due to narrow streets/constant traffic coming the other way. "Sorry, I got stuck behind a bus" is a common (and legit!) excuse for arriving somewhere late. And in UK and London, we have a LOT of buses which does not seem to be the case in most US cities I have visited where Buses are probably less than 10% of traffic compared to more like 50% (or even approaching 75-90% in some central areas) in central London (anecdotal figures)
The fact that tall vehicles cant go under these is a limitation sure, but right now (in London at least) its very hard for ANYTHING to get past a bus (even cyclists or motorcyclists sometimes) so allowing cars to get past if not lorries is a massive step forward.
When can we get these in London?!
Only drawback I can see is people driving into the back of the thing. I imagine they will be riddled with sensors and big flashing lights if something too tall is approaching from behind (and I would assume that forward looking sensors will stop it just driving into stuff on its own).
Plus there are not bus lanes everywhere. But in theory yeah :-)
If we had these in London we could return bus lanes to the rest of the traffic or use it for dedicated cycle-lanes or pedestrian use.
Hopefully they have this planned. Or maybe this is just a way to suck money from city budget to private pockets or even marketing stunt, that would make more sense.
This coming at you from behind is not all that different to a motorbike, is it? You'd have a special traffic light phase at each end to allow it to loop around safely. This has to be much cheaper than digging tunnels anywhere where earthquakes are a concern.
According to this video, the bus would have higher priority than other cars during signalling:
https://www.facebook.com/shanghaiist/videos/1015460854966603...
What could possibly go wrong?
I don't think this kind of vehicle is energy efficient. The aerodynamics of the vehicle doesn't seem to be very good. That amount of energy can carry more people and be energy efficient(compared to this) for a regular metro/sub-way or trams.
Is this really better than a standard elevated railway? Trains fit much more than 300 people, already, today.
The use case for this is the same as light rail, shorter distances with more frequent stops. Basically this is to commuter rail as commuter rail is to high speed rail.
In other words, this is a beefier trolley car. Same concept, larger capacity.
It does have to stop at intersections, but can also go faster than traffic on the same road.
Gutters, shoulders, bike lanes, etc. Sidewalks are also often wider than they need to be - there's usually a dead two feet or so on the sidewalks of major roads where signs or parking meters are planted.
As for the ground area it needs, it appears that the rails are roughly the width of a suburban sidewalk[1]. Add guard rails to keep people and vehicles from interfering with it and you have close to half a travel lane on each side consumed by this. What then is the advantage to this versus taking a travel-lane's width for a tram or installing an elevated people mover?
[1] http://www.borntoengineer.com/china-unveils-prototype-stradd...
The idea is to ride on existing (or slightly modified) roadway without taking lanes away from cars.
That's only true in traffic jams. Due to operational restrictions on how mass transit vehicles can safely operate (limits on acceleration and breaking, limits on centripetal acceleration on curves, distance between stops, average dwell times, etc..) bus/tram operating speeds are only a fraction of their peak running speed, which is somewhere between 25% and 60%.
This is a false assumption. The elevated bus does block traffic when crossing intersections, which it does somewhat slowly due to restrictions on the turning radius, and it does block traffic from switching lanes.
This doesn't mean the concept is silly. The main feature is that this concept doesn't require a dedicated tram path, nor does it appear to require extensive road work (i.e., installing a rail track).
Elevated trains and subways in Chicago and New York can and do act as light (not commuter) rail with stops every few blocks.
Limiting it to a controlled path makes sense for this design though.
Those are fundamentally incompatible. Either it does have dedicated space (which the article certainly indicates it does, both elevated platforms and travel paths) or it will be delayed by traffic. You can't have both.
It's almost that time of year in Boston when many people move c. Sep 1. Some get "Storrowed":
http://realestate.boston.com/news/2015/08/28/your-guide-to-a...
super cool.
Time will tell.
Whenever I have a thought like this, I think of IT-related articles in mainstream press and how much information they omit in there. It's city/traffic planning. Someone definitely thought about issues like this. We're just not going to read about it in press, just like nobody will get minutes of the planning meetings of the latest Windows release.
I think they might add a vanity panel so you can't see the tyres and trusses making hitting the thing less tangling and perhaps even add flashing warnings if you are veering too close to the thing. Given the width and height of the TEB it looks rather stable.
Only someone who is aware of the dangers introduced by how their peripheral vision will be affected is going to have the foresight to "focus on the road". Other people are going to slam into the person in front of them. That's my prediction anyway, I might be wrong but let's wait and see.
Same reason we're not building as many CRISPR labs.
We are afraid. They're not." - https://twitter.com/0xa59a2d/status/760659669735976960