China has built an elevated bus that travels above car traffic

Re:China has built an elevated bus that travels above car tr... by geezerjay on Wednesday August 03, 2016 @01:34PM (#12219831)

> 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.

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.

http://citytransport.info/PhotoCD/PCD13a_098a.jpg

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Re:China has built an elevated bus that travels above car tr... by takno on Thursday August 04, 2016 @09:37AM (#12225372)

The picture you link to is probably exactly what the original author had in mind. It has mostly wooden bodywork and a metal subframe which in the event of a collision is given to riding up onto the carriage in front and killing everybody. They were literal death traps.

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.

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