China develops mega straddle buses!
BEIJING, China - August 25, 2010 - China has developed a bus that straddles the road, thereby allowing it to pass over normal road traffic on China’s busy city streets. The buses are 18 feet wide and 13.5 feet high, which means they take up two lanes on most roadways.
They are actually proceeding with this particular idea and I suspect that we will see it in pilot mode. I do not think that they will be able to avoid a guardrail configuration though. Placed at a height of up to ten feet it would consist of a post and beam structure that would not impede pedestrian traffic and the post spacing could be rather substantial as needed for alley access.
One can even provide popup beams for truck access and the like in certain circumstances. At ten feet or even more, you do not interfere with normal cross street traffic.
The challenge is to avoid creating a new barrier if one wishes to deploy this on urban main streets with lots of traffic.
Obviously though, cost will drive this and that will be the main reason this option may be adopted. Plenty of high volume corridors simply do not as yet justify a subway but definitely need better public transportation options.
One excellent application will be center-to-center movement along existing freeway connections in U.S. cities.
