Straddling Bus

Many thanks Mr Pathy for posting this.

The "straddling bus" does away with road space use since it girdles & uses the edges of roads, whilst allowing other vehicles to pass beneath & through it freely !

This is certainly a breakthrough, though I doubt if it'll be useful for cities like bangalore that has a very diffuse, complicated network of roads. The idea might work best for new area /township developments where new long distance levelled roads are to be built. The straddling bus infrastructure can then be built along with the new road, similar to BRT.

The buses are said to be eco-friendly too & use normal power, drawn from either rails or via connectors - truly an amazing new idea ! Beijing is said to start trials of this soon.

Here is another report about this new system.

It is better to keep moving part smaller.

Not necessarily, if the corridor is straight & the number of commuters are large.

It will be interesting to see how the safety of the pedestrians and even cars are handled. How does move through the junctions?

The bus is said to travel on tracks at the edges of the streets or on tyres with guiding system. So, passage through junctions would be similar to light rail or trams with tracks that might be embedded into the street surface, allowing other vehicles to share the streets easily.

Safety of pedestrians can be an issue since the bus width is large - will need to be tested to know issues. Cars might actually be safer since the buses girdle the whole street & allow them to pass beneath.