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.
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.
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.
(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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
This directly contradicts your first point
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
It could work on longer straight roads, no corners.
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.
If they're just premetros they can (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premetro)
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.
You will struggle to find many members of the retail market using those in cities outside of america
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.