DeviceGuru

In an effort to battle China’s growing traffic, air pollution, and energy consumption challenges, Chinese researchers are contemplating giant “straddling buses” capable of carrying up to 1200 passengers at a once along motorways, and without reducing the road space available to cars.

According to a video presentation, the straddling buses would be 6 meters wide and between 4 and 4.5 meters high. They would operate above car traffic and below overpasses, travel at around 40 km/h, reduce traffic by up to 30 percent, and be powered by a combination of municipally-supplied electricity and solar power.

Chinese straddling bus concept
(click each image to enlarge)

In the video, Song Youzhou, chairman of Shenzhen Hashi Future Parking Equipment Co. Ltd., discusses and demonstrates a number of key features of the straddling bus concept, including how they would travel on rails, coexist with normal traffic, recharge their batteries, and more.

Click the image below to view the video, which is in Chinese. (Note: a link to an English translation of the video appears further down the page.)

An English translation of the above video appears on ChinaHush.com. Quoting from the beginning of the site’s translation…

“What you can see from the video is traffic jams, what you can hear is noise, and there is also invisible air pollution. At present, there are mainly 4 types of public transits in China: subway, light-rail train, BRT, and normal bus. They have advantages and disadvantages, for example, subway costs a lot and takes long time to build; BRT takes up road spaces and produces noises as well as pollution to the air. How to develop environmental-friendly public transportation? Straddling bus provides a solution. Let’s watch a demonstration.

The complete translation is available here. Additionally, an article about the straddling bus (in Chinese) appears to be available for download here (pdf file).