madd0ct0r wrote:4 lanes each side dual carriageway in an urban area dense enough to warrant the bus commuter routes? Tch. Americans.
I was responding to someone else's suggestion, by the way.
So we're talking a 2 lane road. (I'm avoid the word highway since I'm not sure of the connotations - is it more like a dual carrigeway or a national speed limit road?). That's two lanes for each direction of travel, so four lanes in total. These can be wide lanes for fast flowing traffic, or they could be London lanes where you can shave using passing cars. The first one is not safe nor ideal for pedestrians to cross really, the latter is very common, normally built in at junctions with a central refuge so that pedestrians can cross when that lane is stopped anyway.
Although I suspect you get more sideswipes when the lanes are very close together, also a higher risk of accidents blocking all lanes. It's necessary when you're running streets through a crowded metropolitan area, but undesirable if you're planning a city with the intent that vehicle traffic be a common thing. Although if you're planning for pedestrian traffic, you probably don't want level crossings for pedestrians to have to cross more than, oh, two wide lanes of traffic at a time? Three, tops?
Eh, I'm just rambling.
These sort of buses are not going to be operating the winding routes of the UK where they loop around each suburb as they pass along a major circuit from the city to one point and back. These buses are going to be travelling above one of the big obvious and straight roads in the album. They will span both lanes. Trucks and lorries will not be able to pass. They will stop at each major set of apartment blocks, or at every 500-750m along the road, whichever is needed for the commuter density. When the current bus stops, traffic builds up behind it in that lane, some of it tries to pull out and overtake, and the other lane also gets snarled up. You either patiently sit behind it, or you join the sea of angry horns trying to push past and around it.
When the new high level bus is running, the cars in both lanes drain underneath it. The trucks and lorries still have to sit patiently behind it so you would get similar traffic jams possibly occurring (assuming Quinghado hasn't started traffic rules that keep most lorries off the 2 lane roads during the day - it's pretty common worldwide to do that for traffic flows). The jams being further away from the lead vehicle that is starting and stopping tends to stretch the jam out a bit like a spring (since each driver has to wait for the car ahead to move a bit, then start to move - the result is slower for the end lorry to start moving again, slower for it to start stopping again. These slower accelerations and deccelerations are much much less likely to trigger jams when people are trying to push across lanes, if someone does push half out, there is normally a bit more space opening up to get them out of the way and keep the traffic flowing.
That is... an interesting point, actually. Under those specific circumstances and assuming appropriate precautions are taken, the two lane bus may actually work a little better than the one-lane bus, and it can hold more people so you don't need buses stopping every five minutes or whatever along the busy thoroughfare.
My only remaining concern is that if it runs in big deep trenches in the pavement, it interferes with the ability of other vehicles to safely use the road.
Narrow lanes means slower traffic ( 10-40mph in most of london), not more sideswipes. Intentionally slowing the traffic is common in planning design. It makes for a friendlier shared space on commercial streets and by allowing cars to pack closer together safely, often dosent change the vehicles per hour. Junctions are things that snarl traffic and raise accident numbers. Clearways and reducing the number of junctions have been a successful experiment for maintaing consistently higher flows. Green wave traffic lights are quite good at speed habit management imo.
I will note if the bus is bigger it can hold more people. That normally means it stops more often, but it might be that above twenty passengers there is always someone wanting to get on or get off so going from twenty to two hundred might not make a difference there.
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This thing might be useful in very specific circumstances, on roads specially designed for it, with other traffic that is specially restricted to work around it. I can't see it working in many places in Europe due to narrow, curving roads, roundabouts, pedestrians being used to crossing the street wherever they damn well please, and people parking at the side of the road all being the norm. It would also impede the progress/be impeded by even a relatively small van or 4x4 which are very common for private individuals living in cities to own so you couldn't realistically ban them from residential streets.
It would have to completely replace more traditional two decker buses on shared roads as well, otherwise it would lose its main advantage. Meaning those buses would not be able to use main artery roads, whilst the stilt bus could ONLY use those roads. Lots of piling off one bus onto another for commuters.
I assume this is designed to solve a very specific problem unique to the way Chinese cities are laid out, which it may well be very good at - but probably not for export.
It obviously won't work in Europe, but it can and most likely will work in the newly-urbanizing cities of South East Asia, which is quite probably the main export market for the vehicle after China, should it come to actual serial production.
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Part of the issue, though, is that this bus only works with roads specifically designed in advance to accommodate it, and designing the roads to accommodate it makes them less useful for other vehicles. At which point the prudent urban planner might just invest in an elevated train or some such.
That thing does not seem practical at all. it will require all bus platforms to be elevated so you can get on the damn thing which would require a sizeable change in infrastructure routes. For newly developing areas it may work since they can be built specifically for it but established areas would be really difficult.
If one of these things tried to operate on Edinburgh's Princess Street, it would be completely useless and they already spent a decade trying to add a tram system that fucked up massively. The only way I really see this working is if they were built as inter-city coaches that travel along specific routes.
However, a train is going to be faster and the route would have to be dedicated to it so that nothing of a certain height could go on it which might as well make it a personal track... so again the trains already exist.
It might make sense if the idea was to scrap train real estate and somehow use this bus to take over passenger trains between locations but it sure will not work in any place in Scotland and attempting it would be a disaster.
Simon_Jester wrote:Part of the issue, though, is that this bus only works with roads specifically designed in advance to accommodate it, and designing the roads to accommodate it makes them less useful for other vehicles. At which point the prudent urban planner might just invest in an elevated train or some such.
Cost. These wopuld be much much much cheaper than light rail. I agree the U profile track needs to go -they need to run at grade on rubber or steel on embedded rails.
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PREDATOR490 wrote:That thing does not seem practical at all. it will require all bus platforms to be elevated so you can get on the damn thing which would require a sizeable change in infrastructure routes. For newly developing areas it may work since they can be built specifically for it but established areas would be really difficult.
Why would it be impossible to implement a staircase into this thing?
Also, what is wrong with having to plan the infrastructure in a specific way. We have been planning infrastructure around public transport for ever. There is nothing unusual about that.
Even if you had to there isn´t even anything unusual about elevating all platforms. This is done in plenty of places.
If one of these things tried to operate on Edinburgh's Princess Street, it would be completely useless and they already spent a decade trying to add a tram system that fucked up massively. The only way I really see this working is if they were built as inter-city coaches that travel along specific routes.
However, a train is going to be faster and the route would have to be dedicated to it so that nothing of a certain height could go on it which might as well make it a personal track... so again the trains already exist.
It might make sense if the idea was to scrap train real estate and somehow use this bus to take over passenger trains between locations but it sure will not work in any place in Scotland and attempting it would be a disaster.
And citing an example where this wouldn´t work isn´t really useful. I mean, a ferry wouldn´t be very great if they tried operating it in Edinborgh´s Princess Street either due to the lack of water but that doesn´t mean that ferries are useless.
Thing is, straddling bus designs are specifically intended to work with existing traffic ythe same roads as regular traffic, or there would be no reason to build them as straddlers.
So if it doesn't seem as though they can operate along normal roads, even if those roads are significantly modified, then that means they're failing at their intended mission.
PREDATOR490 wrote:That thing does not seem practical at all. it will require all bus platforms to be elevated so you can get on the damn thing which would require a sizeable change in infrastructure routes. For newly developing areas it may work since they can be built specifically for it but established areas would be really difficult.
Why would it be impossible to implement a staircase into this thing?
Unless Chinese public transport has a systematic "fuck the disabled" policy, it's not nearly that simple.
PREDATOR490 wrote:That thing does not seem practical at all. it will require all bus platforms to be elevated so you can get on the damn thing which would require a sizeable change in infrastructure routes. For newly developing areas it may work since they can be built specifically for it but established areas would be really difficult.
Why would it be impossible to implement a staircase into this thing?
Unless Chinese public transport has a systematic "fuck the disabled" policy, it's not nearly that simple.
That actually would not surprise me... growing nations like China generally only give lip service to accommodations for disability, as most people with visible disabilities or wheelchairs will end up being largely shut-ins due to not really having any place in society. The deaf and blind will be able to get by better than others, but I honestly don't know that China has anything like the ADA.
It wouldn't surprise me if China is about as accommodating to the disabled as the US was when it had the same level of industrialization and creature comforts- that is to say, some time between 1930 and 1960.
In a fully developed society, designing infrastructure so that 100% of the population rather than 95% of the population can use it, even when it costs more, is a commonly accepted idea. In a society where much of the population still has NO infrastructure, there tends to be more emphasis on making it cheap enough to be built quickly and in quantity.
If you look at the proposal when it was first proposed 6 years ago, it was either meant to run by rail (which won't make it a bus) or on wheels using "autopilot" technology so it can recognise the specific marked lanes.
If it uses rails, it would be more expensive infrastructure wise than if it could run on wheels. It remains to be seen whether its selling point, ie cheaper to build than subways is true. Obviously they might not need stations since it can park at the stop, but if it has a lot of demand, I can't image passengers clogging up the streets at the stand. They would need a station to go to. The other thing claimed is that it can be build faster than subways. Again this remains to be seen, especially since the Chinese have lots of experiences building subways, but no one has experience building one of these. So again I would say to the designers, prove it and then adopt it.
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Simon_Jester wrote:Thing is, straddling bus designs are specifically intended to work with existing traffic ythe same roads as regular traffic, or there would be no reason to build them as straddlers.
So if it doesn't seem as though they can operate along normal roads, even if those roads are significantly modified, then that means they're failing at their intended mission.
But they might work with new roads or significantly modified existing roads.
Or they might not work, indeed, dut I find the arguments in this thread rather weak. Disabled people and lane changes. Come on, we regulate bus traffic separately from normal traffic with conventional busses, even with special bus traffic lights so they get through traffic more swiftly. It is not unthinkable that some sort of regulation could efficiently regulate a straddling bus.
salm wrote:
Or they might not work, indeed, dut I find the arguments in this thread rather weak. Disabled people and lane changes. Come on, we regulate bus traffic separately from normal traffic with conventional busses, even with special bus traffic lights so they get through traffic more swiftly. It is not unthinkable that some sort of regulation could efficiently regulate a straddling bus.
'We' who? Traffic laws aren't the same everywhere. Here in the States about the only thing that's going to be different is some cities have special bus lanes. I've never heard of traffic lights specifically designated to direct bus traffic here.
The question here is whether these are truly more useful and/or safe than conventional buses, which are already used in large numbers.
Well in this case we is Germany but i am sure signals for busses, trams and other types of public transportation vehicles are common else where, too. Here is a selection of lights and signs you see often but have nothing to do with you if you are in a car. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stra%C3%9 ... eutschland
Even if you have never heard of special bus lights the concept of regulating one type of traffic participant differently than another type can't be all that difficult to grasp or come up with. This isnt rocket science.
Of course it's not rocket science... but good luck trying to get more than your basic red-yellow-green stoplights put up in the US. Half the municipalities won't have the money for it, most of the other half will scream about government interference, some might try it for a while and give it up as a bad job because none of the motorists understand the new light system... I mean, hell, roundabouts are not something that most American motorists understand, and they don't even involve traffic lights!
In someplace like China, where traffic regulations are a more recent thing, and they have a strong central government that'll say 'we do things differently now' and people actually comply, that's something you can get away with.
In the USA... should they even go for it... they'll be running advertisements on TV for a year before they hang the lights, they'll have articles in the paper arguing the pros and cons of the lights, someone deploring this as a waste of taxpayer money, other people talking about how the old traffic lights were good enough and how this is COMMUNISM at work... and then when they do hang the lights, nobody will know what the hell to do, including the bus drivers because the bus company didn't train them to deal with the new lights except a five-minute seminar the day of...
I mean, it could work. Someplace like, I don't know, Rhode Island. Seattle. But most of the US? Nah.
However, it doesn´t matter if your average motorist understands theses signs. They are not made for normal drivers. Nobody understands these sign here either besides bus and tram drivers. That is enough.
In some places these signs simply switch to "go" for the bus when it comes close to an intersection and switches all the car lights to red. You dont even notice this as a regular motorist. You just do whatever you regular traffic light tells you to do and the bus driver does the rest.
So, bus bites the dust? That's... sad, even if expected.
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Looks far too impractical to work on general roads. There are far too many SUV's and vans that are higher than 2m . The bus would get stuck behind all the time. It would be accident waiting to happen. Someone driving into it with car thats a bit too high would happen often. People driving into low bridges is common occorence and bridges dont move and have height warnings before them yet people still manage to crash into them.
I had a bad feeling when they changed it from a bus to a train requiring rails. At that point one wonders why city planners cannot just build a monorail above the road or next to it. In effect it runs into the same problem solar roadways had, that it was more efficient to build conventional tech next to the road instead of taking up road space.
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Basically, use less energy, no unsightly overhead wires, less leakage of electricity into the ground (since its charged up very quickly at a central station or from the top of the vehicle), saving maintenance costs etc. Which would be around the same time as the straddling bus was around. And a quick google search doesn't seem to suggest anyone else is using such technology for trams, although Europe did discuss this in 2015. The Chinese version was built in 2014 and is up and running as per 2016. Its also shown on the Discovery channel documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h8y3b5NTt0
Of course anti China trolls aren't interested in facts.
Never apologise for being a geek, because they won't apologise to you for being an arsehole. John Barrowman - 22 June 2014 Perth Supernova.
Countries I have been to - 14.
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