Chinese plan for “traffic-straddling bus” ended after 32 people were arrested

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/04/world/asia/china-bus-road-straddling.html

by mantesso • 9 years ago

98 115 9 years ago

nytimes.com

GordonS2• 9 years ago

If nothing else, this always seemed like utter madness from a safety perspective.

maze-le3• 9 years ago

I bet people had the same thing to say about cars in the early 20th century (not without some justification though).

specializeded• 9 years ago

Still have them today... Driving home last night, I tried to imagine how many of the people next to me on the road were drunk while riding their 2 ton steel horses home.

puranjay• 9 years ago

I'd love to see accident rates for horse riders vs. car drivers.

delecti3• 9 years ago

Your caveat invalidates your point. Motor vehicles are a big cause of death in many countries.

Luc• 9 years ago

"China's Vision", I mean, come on. There seems to be some opinion leaking into the title.

bhouston2• 9 years ago

It was just the vision of a bunch of hustler/entrepreneurs. It seemed too easy to hit with large vehicles and a death trap for vehicles underneath it.

An elevated rail system seemed so much easier and without the difficulties that this introduced.

But an elevated rail system required significantly more investment thus it had to be city sanctioned in a large way, rather than the minimal investments this required.

wavefunction• 9 years ago

I imagine the turning radius for this thing is significant enough that you'd have to tear out existing intersections and even push the buildings back from where they exist now.

Just so it can turn. I think in this specific comparison elevated light rail would be significantly less-disruptive and cheaper too.

tianshuo• 9 years ago

Their only demo went back and forth for 200 meters, and nothing happened ever after. SCAM SCAM SCAM SCAM, there is no way for the bus to turn except for tearing down infrastructure and using 10 lanes. The creators made a fund out of the project(promised 12% annualized return) that attracted a lot of small investors and scammed them out of their money.

m3kw9• 9 years ago

Anything that promises a rate higher than what govt can promise is a scam. Ie tbills

cesarb2• 9 years ago

Having a higher rate than what the government gives you just means it has more risk, not necessarily that it's a scam. And 12% isn't that high, it was a common annualized rate of return a few years ago here in Brazil.

aquadrop• 9 years ago

What would be the point of using anything but the govt's promise then?

crispyambulance• 9 years ago

The strange thing is they actually built a full-size "working" demo, which if anything, only reinforces how precarious and ill-advised the whole concept was to begin with.

It makes me wonder if it wasn't a scam at all, but just a really bad idea with believers that wanted to make it real?

api• 9 years ago

The line between folly and scam is not absolutely sharp.

It's like murder. There's first degree premeditated murder, crimes of passion, insanity, and manslaughter. Manslaughter can in some cases be charged for gross negligence, or the death can occur as a result of another crime where murder was not the intent.

Scams can be similar. A pure scam is like first degree murder. The scammer(s) plan it as a scam and execute it with intent. But sometimes a failure or misadventure can evolve into a scam.

This happens when those behind it double down in the face of clear evidence of total non-viability. When the tech doesn't work for fundamental reasons, nobody is truly interested, etc., but the operators keep ratcheting up the salesmanship and doubling down, they are heading into scam territory.

You see this a lot with quack medicines backed by people with actual medical degrees. Sometimes a doctor or researcher comes up with an idea and then their ego gets into it. They start fantasizing about being the greatest genius in medicine, the person who cured cancer, etc. So even when the data comes in and shows that their treatment doesn't work any better than placebo they refuse to "see" this. Their ego won't let them and they delude themselves. Over time they devolve much like Walter White from Breaking Bad, going from legitimate doctor to quack. It's rarely a sudden thing.

marcinx27• 9 years ago

The name's Lanley -- Lyle Lanley. And I come before you good people tonight with an idea. Probably the greatest ... Aww, it's not for you. It's more of a Shelbyville idea.

Retric6• 9 years ago

That does not actually kill the concept as long as you treat it like an above ground subway system. The real limitation is the buses can't cross 4 way intersections while cars are blocking their path and they can't travel around obstructions.

Another options is you placed them on slightly elevated tracks and add bridges over intersections, the larger problem is they need a lot of space above them which means overpasses etc could limit placement without major investments and it really just reinvents the monorail concept.

So, IMO it's unlikely to work in most cities, but there are a lot of city's and you only need a few. Thus, it probably did not start as a scam even if evolved into it.

pizzetta• 9 years ago

A group of people developed the idea, then another different group bought the patents. It's the second group who sough investment with apparently no intent to deliver.

simias2• 9 years ago

Well, an other big limitation is that anything taller than a car can't fit underneath, so you'd need to leave at least one more free lane for trucks, buses and motorcycles.

mikeash5• 9 years ago

All real-world above ground light rail transit systems are able to turn and don't require gigantic roads.

microtherion• 9 years ago

Amateurs! They shouldn't have built a prototype at all and gone straight for an ICO.

dave_sullivan• 9 years ago

It's a train... but instead of tickets, it has CryptoTickets, the ICO of which will fund the development of said train. Huge!

Although to be fair, can't you pre-sell condos to finance their construction?

izacus• 9 years ago

So it was basically your average Kickstarter hardware startup? :)

tyingq• 9 years ago

Intersections and cars under the bus wanting to turn left or right would be interesting. Dedicated turn lanes helps a little, but you would have to trail or lead the bus to see them coming soon enough.

GoToRO5• 9 years ago

Just ban cars. It's not that hard. We banned horses, why not cars?

dec0dedab0de• 9 years ago

when did horses get banned?

GoToRO5• 9 years ago

Depends on your location. In my country they are banned on highways, national roads and cities or in other words in all those places in which cars rule.

manarth• 9 years ago

2007, in Romania [1][2]. More specifically, horse-drawn carts were banned. From what I can see, the movement to ban them stems from an argument that horse-drawn carts/carriages are a form of animal cruelty [3]. I haven't seen anything that singles out/bans horses (with riders, rather than carriages) though.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/nadiaarumugam/2013/02/14/the-ro...

[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1578965/Horses-lef...

[3] https://www.peta.org/issues/animals-in-entertainment/horse-d...

nickrio2• 9 years ago

I thought horses was banned because they ... produce some unwanted mass on the road which hard to clean?

Cars on the other hand, don't do that at all.

Maybe that's the reason why cars are not banned.

alistairSH• 9 years ago

Horse poop degrades fairly rapidly (relative to omnivore and carnivore excrement). Doesn't smell as bad either.

Cars produce all sorts of chemical compounds that ruin the air we breath.

bhouston2• 9 years ago

Non-electric cars will be banned in most inner cities probably within the decade because of their pollution, sort of a parallel with how horses were banned earlier.

pjc50• 9 years ago

Horses were never banned (except maybe locally), they're just far more expensive and difficult to run than cars.

babyrainbow• 9 years ago

Yes. But cars produce unwanted mess in atmosphere that in almost impossible to clean..

viraptor2• 9 years ago

It was already addressed in other content that they're not banned everywhere, but additionally, the poop you mention is not a big problem. In many places horses in the cities are forced to wear horse-size napies which catch the poop.

antris• 9 years ago

I thought horses was banned because they ... produce some unwanted mass on the road which hard to clean? >Cars on the other hand, don't do that at all.

Cars do it, but instead of it being a hard to clean mass, it's a nearly-impossible-to-clean toxic gas that kills thousands of people every year.

gpvos3• 9 years ago

Depending on local regulations, you may of course be fined if you don't clean up your horse's mess.

corobo3• 9 years ago

Not sure where you are but here in the UK it's quite legal to ride a horse or drive a horse with a carriage of some kind on the road. The carriage needs to be "road worthy" but aside from that you don't even need a license of any kind unless you're transporting passengers.

It's just not very fast compared to modern cars and quite expensive so not as many people do it.

Edit: Oh one minor mostly common sense note -

You can't ride/drive horses on the motorway and probably shouldn't on faster roads or dual carriageways due to the rest of the traffic going far faster than you.

GoToRO5• 9 years ago

In my country they are banned on highways, national roads, cities. I was referring to that.

I think banning them on congested roads will increase the demand for public transport which is what we should have on those road anyway.

dspillett• 9 years ago

Also they should not use cycle lanes unless local signs explicitly state otherwise.

madeofpalk• 9 years ago

In fact, in Australia, if you ride your horse up to a pub/bar, they're technically legally required to give water and feed for the horses.

technofiend2• 9 years ago

"We" did? Who is "we"?

"Every person having control or charge of a vehicle shall, whenever upon any way and approaching any horse, drive, manage, and control such vehicle in such a manner as to exercise every reasonable precaution to prevent the frightening of such horse, and to insure the safety and protection of any person riding or driving the same."

That's the law (for instance) in New Hampshire. The same article (the very first link when I search for "horse street legal united states") http://cs.thehorse.com/blogs/horses-and-the-law/archive/2012... further states

Traffic laws in a few states, including Colorado, Michigan, and New Mexico, specifically state that horses have all the rights and obligations of other vehicles when they are being ridden or driven on a public highway. Everywhere else, except in states like Louisiana where it appears to be illegal to ride a horse on a paved road, riders and drivers probably enjoy similar rights and obligations by implication.
Some states prohibit specific conduct when riding on a highway: It is illegal to ride a horse at night in New Mexico; to cross bridges at a gait faster than a walk in Idaho, Mississippi, and Pennsylvania; to ride or drive a horse "recklessly" in Nevada; to race or run horses on a highway in Kentucky, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, or New Jersey; to ride on a levee in Kentucky; and to ride on interstate highways in several states. Horses should be ridden on the right-hand side of the road, going with the flow of traffic, almost everywhere except Colorado, where riders must ride on the left.

Sorry but I don't think you know what you're talking about, you're not in the United States, or you failed to specify enough context so that in that limited situation your statement is true. At the very least you failed to make a simple Google search for a sweeping generalization that is demonstrably not true.

GoToRO5• 9 years ago

Hold your horses! It's just a comment on internet and I didn't think I had to treat all edge cases :)) Also, if you don't have enough context for something it doesn't mean you should pick any random context...

sillysaurus3• 9 years ago

Horses aren't banned. If you spend some time in a big city, they're everywhere. Police ride them, people ride them, people use them to pull carts and pull other people. The horses are always less useful than machines, but they exist.

profmonocle• 9 years ago

Horses declined after a better option - cars - were widely available and accepted. I'm all for coming up with a better solution, but if you ban cars before we have that solution you'll effectively shut down civilization in much of the developed world.

27182818284• 9 years ago

China doing a massive ban-change to vehicles wouldn't be a first. Friedman wrote about their policy shifts in Hot, Flat, and Crowded. China has implemented changes to vehicle emissions in just a few years that took the US decades (e.g. unleaded gas). So, okay, they won't ban cars outright, but it isn't impossible to imagine other scenarios that would be impossible to imagine the US doing in the same time period.

rasz• 9 years ago

Bicycle sharing companies are next I guess, give it a year or two.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdsb2wwn-7g

averagewall• 9 years ago

What worries me about the bike shares is they all take a 100-200 rmb refundable deposit from each user. That's an unsecured interest free "crowdsourced" loan! If the company collapses, it's riders' deposits that'll go down the toilet.

baybal2• 9 years ago

Yes, they used to be deposit free, but once bigger ones started demanding them, all of them did too. Now, their business model is effectively that of a bank.

seanmcdirmid3• 9 years ago

There was an article in chinadaily a while back in how the government was forcing the bike companies to deposit these deposits in a special account. So it might not be as bad as that, but I wouldn't expect to get my deposit back either.

aembleton• 9 years ago

Maybe when you've got too many of them, but Mobike has just arrived in Manchester, UK and I've tried it a couple of times. I really like it and am impressed with how well it actually works. They just need to deploy more bikes so that it is easier for me to find one during busy periods.

lawless123• 9 years ago

A tram would be much safer and probably cause less disruption.

astrodust5• 9 years ago

A "tram" is also a proven technology that doesn't get investors.

A traffic straddling bus is one of those "so crazy it just might work" ideas that gets funding.

timwaagh• 9 years ago

still seems a decent idea to me. maybe something went wrong in the execution here, but it could be a solution for densely packed historical urban centers that do not wish to tear down too many buildings.

gumby2• 9 years ago

BTW this isn't the original headline (the error in the rewrite caused me to click on the title).

NYT would have written this in the indefinite present: "Chinese plan for “traffic-straddling bus” ends with 32 arrests." Except it didn't end, and the NYT headline says so.

Dylan16807• 9 years ago

What do you mean? It ended a while ago.

gumby2• 9 years ago

Not sure what you mean. Either the project is effectively dead, or ended, after the arrests, or its technically continuing though for all intents and purposes is over. Or it ended a while ago and that's why it's a scam?

The article as up right now has a title that says it's over, but did not have the same headline when I added my comment :-(. Also says it's effectively over as a result of the arrests which it didn't before. Unfortunately the NYT does not have a policy of always indicating edits. So this may have made my comment look odd.

However FWIW the NYT typically won't use the past tense, and in particular the perfect, for topics which are ongoing. US Civil war? Sure. Bernie Madoff? Possibly, possibly not, depending. People having just been arrested gets a present, or at best imperfect tense.

jlebrech• 9 years ago

why don't we have low altitude blimps? ones that pick up a car and drop it off between the car's destination and the next customer? or pull it by cable using a filtering bike of sorts?

ams6110• 9 years ago

From the photos it looks like this thing runs on tracks. OK, this concept was invented a century ago in cities like Chicago, it's called an Elevated Train.

99_00• 9 years ago

Interesting to to compare the comments now versus then

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12214675

Animats• 9 years ago

They actually built a prototype? Renders of that thing have been around for years. I'd wondered if the track system would be designed into one of China's new cities. It would have been the largest mobile passenger vehicle since the German Imperial Gauge Railway.[1]

The CGI videos of it cornering show the sections bending, which only works in CGI.[2][3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breitspurbahn

[2] https://youtu.be/vaUTIIggEis?t=131 [3] https://youtu.be/vaUTIIggEis?t=138

blurbleblurble• 9 years ago

If this was a scam... what does that make the hyperloop?

diyseguy• 9 years ago

Too bad, I was picturing this as another way for Amazon to deliver packages or perhaps snacks to people (while waiting in traffic)

Chinese plan for “traffic-straddling bus” ended after 32 people were arrested

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