Why China’s lane-straddling super-bus won’t get off the ground
The Transit Elevated Bus started with a fanfare. But now questions are being asked
By B.R.
IT STARTED with a fanfare, albeit with a bemused tone. “China’s bonkers elevated bus is real and already on the road,” announcedWired on August 3rd. It was not only Wired. Headlines and half-page photos quickly filled the world’s newspapers and webpages, trumpeting the Transit Elevated Bus (TEB, pictured), a magnificent-looking contraption that, it was claimed, would straddle China’s streets, allowing cars to pass underneath it. Passengers could hop on and off from elevated platforms. This would allow the bus to cruise above the traffic jams that plague roads in urban China, while lessening the gridlock for others.
Befitting such a clever, mad-cap idea, the reaction was breathless. Although it crawled along on its inaugural journey, speeds would eventually reach 40 miles per hour, it was said, using rails running either side of the road. Its 300 passengers (1,200, once a few buses were linked together like train carriages) would travel in comfort, in something akin to an airport lounge. Of course, only in China could such a marvellous project get off the ground.
All of a sudden, though, the tone of the headlines changed. Something was amiss. “China blasts its own radical public transport amid safety concerns”, reported the Daily Mail. Some claimed that there had been no test journey after all. Important questions were left unanswered. How would such a bus pass beneath low bridges? What if a tall vehicle wanted to overtake it (the clearance was just seven feet)? How could it warn cars when it wanted to change lanes? How could it go round 90-degree bends?
The answer to all these questions, it seemed, was “it couldn’t”. Alas, less than a month after its “test run”, Bloomberg is now running a story under the headline “Is China’s Super-Bus a Scam?”:
According to China’s state media organs, previously big boosters of the project, the TEB was little more than a publicity stunt—one of the dozens of peer-to-peer lending scams that have duped retail Chinese investors in recent years by promising unreal annual returns.
The bus bust has thus become a symbol of a different—and far more damaging—kind of Chinese ingenuity. The TEB’s promoters promised investors 12% returns on their money, despite the fact that the prototype bus seemed likely to tip over, couldn’t clear most urban bridges and wasn’t tall enough to accommodate most vehicles underneath it. They could get away with it in part because those kinds of numbers are par for the course in China’s P2P lending industry, which averaged returns of 13.3% in 2015.
Investors in the “super-bus” will no doubt be licking their wounds. All radical new forms of transport require lofty ambitions. For his part, Gulliver will instead sink his money into the hyperloops that promise to use linear induction to transport passengers through tubes at 600mph. Or maybe the “lido-line”, a commuter lane for swimmers in London’s canals. They sound a much safer bet.
