CHINESE COMPANY PREPARING TO TEST 1400-PASSENGER TRAFFIC-STRADDLING TUNNEL BUS Meanwhile, in Changzhou: Engineer Song Youzhou tells Xinhua News that the first full-scale model of the road-straddling Transit Explore Bus may be ready for testing by July or August. The developers say the 2-rail “land airbus” system could pick up as many as 1,400 passengers lowered in through the top from a series of elevator-equipped station platforms; the vehicle could drive straight over traffic jams (assuming those jams are less than 7 ft tall) without having to slow down. Song’s version of the tunnel-train concept was first introduced in 2010 but reappeared at this month’s Beijing Intel High Tech Expo with more solid plans for development. Funder TBS Shipping’s animated 3-D concept video can be viewed here. [Xinhua, CityLab]
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O M G just kill me now
It doesn’t address or solve any problem that an elevated train, monorail, or subway, doesn’t already solve. It has all the same problems of fixed guideway at street level such as lightrail or streetcars mixing with traffic.
This will work great, as long as the cars on the roadway below never change lanes.
Also, a low-frequency, high capacity bus is pretty much the exact opposite of what most cities need.
why is everyone knocking this just because of bad drivers. now I envision them on every HOV at least to the grand parkway and main arterial such as Westhiemer, Antoine, Scott, Airline and so on. these things could really save Houston, while keeping out highways and at 16% of the cost of subway/elevated rail! Stop looking for a reason not to and look for a reason to! they could straddle the HOV. these things have 16 ft of clearance underneath most coaches are 14ft and no semi trucks use the HOV! just think carpoolers, single occupant toll payers and thousands of transit riders would really put our already exsist in infrastructure to much better use. I can see them now stopping in far away burbs and even on the radial freeways it would be a great system!
I’m just imagining if Houston’s light rail was like this. You wouldn’t have to bother about the flooding problem, anymore. You could basically hold at least 1200 people, instead of about 600 with two light rail trains connected so there wouldn’t have been a problem with still needing buses to get people from some place(NRG) if too many people. It’s only suppose to cost 15 percent of a subway system. It takes about 40 conventional buses off the road in this guy’s plan. Nobody could use the reason of taking lane space away, anymore, and we could finally have something that txdot would probably be ok with on their freeways and can finally get someplace fast, now, because all the freeways could be changed to use something like this over hov lanes. At least, this makes sense for a country with over a billion people to try something like this.
Oddly enough, this looks like the perfect people-mover to shuttle an entire trainload of passengers from a hypothetical high-speed rail station at Northwest Mall to the Northwest Transit Center.
Gonna file this one just before flying cars, but after maglev.