Maybe if I drive home real gentle, the boss won’t notice the thing about the roof…
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Perhaps they could all ride bikes.
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But it looks so peaceful.
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Can’t they just add a couple of accordion segments? Seems to work fine as a bullshit excuse not to have an actual subway system where I live.
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Yeah, I was assuming that the models accurately displayed the heights of local street and traffic lights in the area for which it’s being proposed, which probably isn’t the case there and definitely isn’t the case anywhere else.
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The over-the-top bus is 2-4 times as wide as bus you pictured.
I saw the bends in the videos, but assumed I wasn’t paying enough attention, since I wasn’t paying close attention.
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True.
Could work, though, if the curves are conveniently gentle enough – as mentioned in the article, that’s what happens in the scale model video (at 50 seconds or so):
Yay for accordions!
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I have to force myself to recall that things are different in China. It looks as if anyone parked in the row of cars on the left at the start of that video opened their driver’s side door at the wrong moment, it would be an ex-door. People have a tendency to get out and look around when stuck in traffic jams. Step out at the wrong moment, and swish! New orphans. If someone on the left side had a car failure or a fender bender and pulled their car to the center median, it would become bisected.
As others have mentioned, there are a lot of things in the space above roads. Bridges, lights, electrical cables, overhead signs. But over there, when power wants something it tends to happen…
Having traveled to China dozens of times for work, I can fix your headline for you:
“Straddling buses would only work if Chinese drivers gave a damn about traffic lanes”
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I’m not sure that was what I meant when I said people who insist on posting images should use alt-text.
Oh, well…
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I propose a gigantic people-carrying steam roller for evening out those traffic jams. Pretty soon those snarls would be sorted. And look at all the face you’d save - never having to get out of the bloody way. They deserve nothing less.
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At first glance of the animation, I thought that this was some sort of car bus that picked up the cars as it traveled over them. Glad to see I wasn’t the only one.
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I know a few people have pointed this out already, but it bears repeating: what about tall trucks, low traffic lights, roads under construction, etc.? This looks futuristic and awesome, but even if it were going in one fixed loop like in the video, it still raises dozens of problems.
It’s got about 2m of clearance, which means low-roof and maybe even medium-roof cargo vans (think Ford Transit, for example) would be OK. High-roof vehicles and tractor-trailers would not be. But frankly, that’s nothing new – tall vehicles already have to contend with height restrictions of low-clearance overpasses and such.
The big constraint on this thing is how damned large it is. At 1400-person capacity, it’s more than the crush load of, for instance, a TTC subway train. You aren’t going to be running this on low, traffic, stop-at-every-block routes. You don’t want it running along busy city streets with lots of intersections, either. It looks like a possibility on relatively short, very high demand, routes where various factors prevent subway or light rail from being constructed. Airport to city core, maybe? Major downtown terminal to major satellite city/suburb terminals? No one in their right minds will be stopping for a solitary old lady at the grocery store bus stop when they’re already carrying 700+ people.
As far as lane changing goes, yeah, that’s a problem that I don’t think designated lanes can solve. You’ll probably need barriers lest people get spooked at the worst possible moment. Again, 1400 people; you really don’t want to have to evacuate one of these from the middle of a busy highway.
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All told, are subway systems that costly or difficult to maintain for the average city?
Washington, D.C. certainly has its issues, but are New York/London/Paris in similarly dire public transit straights?
Well, NYC trains are running late, but at least half the stations aren’t in disrepair.
Of course, that station report is from 2008, so things surely have been addressed by now? Not exactly.
London is doing remarkably well – or at the very least, remarkably consistently, for years now.
If Paris Metro has complaints about it, they’re probably in French and I can’t find them 
So the city will have to close the route for a while and re-lay roads with reinforced foundations. On the bright side, while they’re doing that, they can excavate the trenches for a subway.
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Feckin accordian-playing hit-and-run buskers.
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