Not really. Here are some very rough calculations, but I think they get close enough to make the point.
The straddling bus is supposed to have a total length of 60.6m and a width of 7.8m, for a total surface area of 472.68m. A streetcar is 20m long and 2.46m wide, for a total surface area of 49.2m. Total standing and sitting capacity of 156 passengers (plus one driver) for streetcar, 1400 people for the straddling bus. Riders per sq. m?
Streetcar: 3.19
Straddling bus: 2.96.
Of course flight to the Moon is impossible. The wight of coal needed for fuel would be far too great for such a machine to escape the gravity of Earth.
Why would this thing even need to turn corners. This wouldnât be your city bus. It looks to me more as a replacement of airport shuttles or a form of commuter transport. You could install these things on a long stretch of a relatively straight road, such as for example one that connects an airport to a city. Reserve two lanes for cars and exclude trucks and busses from it. A thing relatively easy to do on a section of road delimited by toll booth. You can ensure this by means of physical horizontal barriers. The cost of making poles that hold traffic lights and street signs tad bit higher is trivial in comparison to the cost of elevating a while section of railway above ground.
Especially considering Americans often get in the way of trains even at marked crossings with flashing lights and bells.
Bendy buses. We have them in Bath, where there are few places they can go and they are a danger to cyclists. They tried them in London, where they were also a disaster. So the company that had been conned into buying them took them to Malta, of all places, which is even less suitable.
People will do almost anything rather than raise taxes to provide proper infrastructure, even though the long term effect of better infrastructure tends to be a better economy.
Or how about just reserve two lanes for âbusesâ before you even build the road, and then economise on concrete by just using two thin parallel lines of steel resting on spaced concrete slabs. Then you could have special buses with narrow wheels which had flanges to stop them falling off the narrow tracks. You could even connect the buses together so than one driver was needed for a whole lot of buses.
This is such a good idea I might patent it.
Too late
Personally, I think we could even reduce this to a single line of steel and have the âbusesâ sort of straddle an elevated track to keep them out of the way of traffic.
Not bendy buses, please!
A solid/liquid fuelled rocket using carbon and liquid oxygen might be possible, I just suspect that it would be absurdly big owing to the low specific impulse. But a better rocket scientist - easily done, you only have to beat zero - might be able to give a more informative answer.
It make the Breitspurbahn look practical⌠http://www.breitspurbahn.de/3000.html
In Beijing large trucks are not allowed on major roads until after 10:00pm at night.
For the major Beijing roads there are no traffic lights and big trucks are banned.
Reminds me of the Land Titanic from Futurama.
This could be practical if it took cars instead of individual people.
âŚOr just turn into the bus, because they âdidnât see it.â
Houstonâs still trying to adapt to at-ground light rail, and we still have people who try and make illegal left turns, which are now both illegal and also EXTREMELY unwise and dangerous, and ⌠bam. I canât help but imagine this would continue to happen with these buses.
Watching this is making me kinda sea sick. I ⌠ughbrlâŚ
I see another couple of issues with these busses. Firstly: they have a lot of mass and should thus need a certain distance to stop. At the same time, they rely on vehicles being perfectly aligned and people not suddenly opening their door and walking astray. One might say that this is a general factor in traffic but it seems much more of one with these busses. Secondly: many people might have a panic moment when such a bus passes above them, which would lead them to slam the brakes.
Yeah, weâve got light rail locally that is often not at-ground, and people still manage to collide with it, even when itâs not on streets. They have to drive completely off the road in order to hit it, and they still do it. Hell, the trains regularly hit cars and trucks at crossings because vehicles couldnât get off the tracks. When they hit a truck itâs bad because thereâs the danger of derailing and separation is difficult, so the whole line stops. Iâd hate to think of what a collision would do with this - itâd close off a major road and stop the trains at the same time, and it would happen quite a bit, given that it would be always in - and crossing - traffic.
Of course Paris Metro has complaints about it, most of its users are French.
[quote=âsmut_clyde, post:40, topic:78748â]
Feckin accordian-playing hit-and-run buskers.[/quote]
Actually, nowadays you need to pass an audition to be licensed to play music in the Metro. Now I guess you meant unlicensed buskers, but I couldnât resist sharing this bit of trivia.
I found this opinion piece on Atlantico in which the writer compares the New York and Paris metros (and how they reflect the pragmatic philosophy of their respective host countries). My French is rustyâenough so that I canât recall the French equivalent for that adjective. Fortunately for me, the writer of this piece seems to have calibrated his vocabulary and grammar for second-language readers.
Hereâs a rough translation of the introductory bitâsans Google Translate, because I need the practiceâwith my paraphrase and half-guesses in brackets and my ignorance in parentheses:
"At first glance, the Paris metro system is much better. (Les sièges sont rembourrĂŠs.) [The trains] circulate on [pneumatic rails], which makes them quieter and less (remuantes). Most of the [renovations/improvements] are recent. The New York metro has just one advantage, but itâs [considerable]: it works.
No delays. No stops between stations. 24- hour service [non-stop]. If New York is the city that never goes to sleep, Paris is the city that goes to bed early.
He praises New Yorkâs rapid and (from his experience, complete) restoration of metro service after Hurricane Sandy. He notes the contrast between Parisâ clean, modern, and centralized infrastructure with that of NYCâs borderline-improvisational, wires-goddamn-everywhere approach. However, he argues, NYCâs sometimes ramshackle appearance is not the result of under-investment but rather a pragmatic response to certain infrastructural challenges not seen in Paris. NYCâs metro, for example, has to service a much larger area with higher population density. To achieve and maintain this aim, the city relies on simpler technologies that allow its metro system to be more resilient and flexible than that of Paris, however technologically advanced the latter may be.
Not all countries have those overhead traffic lights so popular in the USA.
