China is suffering some growing pains. Its cities are booming and road builders are having trouble keeping up. After last month’s nine-day traffic jam that stretched for 62 miles, it’s become obvious that something needs to be done.
One company has come up with an innovative result–a large bus with a tunnel underneath to allow two lanes of traffic to pass below it. The so-called Straddling Bus will cruise along at 60 km/hr (37 mph) and can carry up to 1,400 passengers. It’s 6 meters (6.6 yards) wide and up to 4.5 meters (4.9 yards) high. Sensors will warn when cars are getting too close to the sides or if a truck is too tall to make it into the tunnel.
The Straddling Bus has already been approved for use in Beijing, with 186 km (115 miles) of lines earmarked for the new system. Construction will being at the end of the year.
The video shows how it works. Hopefully the safety measures will be built with someone who has a greater grasp of engineering than the translator has of the English language.
Before you start the commute home for the day, consider how bad the traffic could be. Sure, you could get stuck behind a bus or on the train for an hour or so, but how about 9 DAYS?! Thousands of motorists have been stranded on the Beijing-Tibet expressway since August 13th as a road work project has stopped up an already-busy road, and they could be stuck for another few weeks until the project concludes. Heavy traffic is nothing new to the highway, as thousands of trucks pass through daily on one of the few routes into the capital, carrying cargo throughout the country.
Some enterprising (and price-gouging) locals have set up shop along the highway, selling food and drinks at steep prices, though police are patrolling the area around the clock and will remain until the congestion is alleviated. Bored drivers have suggested that “concerts should be held at each congested area every weekend, to alleviate drivers’ homesickness” and why stop there? How about a pop-up hotel or a food truck (though a food bicycle might be better to cut through the stalled vehicles) to ameliorate tension and hunger? There won’t be any traffic tweet-ups, as the government has blocked Twitter along with a number of other websites.
How would you pass the time in the world’s worst traffic jam?
GadlingTV’s Travel Talk, episode 25 – Click above to watch video after the jump
For the final installment in our series on Rome, we’ve saved the best for last & are satisfying our thirst for adventure. Watch as we tour the Vatican, rent Vespas, and check out Rome’s impromptu night life.
On the couch, we’ll dissect the differences between the Vatican & the Holy See, and show you the one place in Rome to peer through a keyhole and view 3 separate countries. Tune in to see just how crazy Roman driving actually is, what the best place public place to go after hours is, and what else the Vatican has to offer beyond the Sistine Chapel.
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Read more about the Holy See right here. Hosts: Aaron Murphy-Crews, Stephen Greenwood
Produced, Edited, and Directed by: Stephen Greenwood, Aaron Murphy-Crews, Drew Mylrea
The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge will be closed indefinitely while crews repair an upper-deck cable that snapped during rush-hour on Tuesday evening. According to the AP, the broken cable and a chunk of bridge metal fell onto the westbound lanes, damaging at least one vehicle.
The cable that snapped was put in last month to repair a crack that was discovered over Labor Day weekend. While the issue is repaired, other forms of transportation will double up their efforts to keep people moving on trains and ferries.
The snapped wire could be a sign of more repair work to come, though. As quoted in the Los Angeles Daily News, a civil engineering professor at UCLA Berkeley called the initial crack a “warning sign” of more problems. He said the repair was really just a Band-Aid and “demonstrates the need for a longer-term solution.” The bridge is 73 years old and carries around 260,000 people each day.
What would happen if your local government announced that, starting tomorrow, most of your town’s traffic signs– including traffic lights, stop signs, and speed limit markers– would be taken down?
I’ve been thinking about this question a lot after reading about several towns that have recently experimented with just such an idea. In the Dutch town of Drachten, for example, all but three of the fifteen traffic lights were removed over a seven-year period. At the main intersection in town, which handles approximately 22,000 cars per day, traffic lights were removed and a round-about was installed. Since the beginning of the experiment, the accident rate has fallen from about eight per year to less than two.
Hans Monderman, a traffic expert who helped design the Drachten experiment, says the project works, paradoxically, “because it is dangerous, which is exactly what we want.” He says the experiment “shifts the emphasis away from the Government taking the risk, to the driver being responsible for his or her own risk.”
Monderman compared this scheme to the way skaters make their way around an ice rink. “Skaters work out things for themselves and it works wonderfully well. I am not an anarchist, but I don’t like rules which are ineffective…”
Similar plans to reduce or eliminate traffic signals, which is part of a concept Monderman calls “Shared Space,” has been implemented in towns in Sweden, New Zealand, the UK, the US, and Germany.
This counterintuitive idea reminds me of the economist Gordon Tullock’s tongue-in-cheek traffic safety suggestion. He proposed installing large spikes into the steering column of all cars, which would propel forward into the driver’s chest if his car impacted another. Talk about a disincentive for risky driving!
In an article in The Atlantic, former UK resident John Staddon also worries that the surfeit of traffic signs in the United States– pointing out every bend, dip, and turn in the road– actually makes us less safe. He writes:
[T]he American system of traffic control, with its many signs and stops, and with its specific rules tailored to every bend in the road, has had the unintended consequence of causing more accidents than it prevents. Paradoxically, almost every new sign put up in the U.S. probably makes drivers a little safer on the stretch of road it guards. But collectively, the forests of signs along American roadways, and the multitude of rules to look out for, are quite deadly.
Why? Because the signs probably distract drivers more than they provide them with useful information. Staddon points out that “attending to a sign competes with attending to the road. The more you look for signs, for police, and at your speedometer, the less attentive you will be to traffic conditions.”
Most of us have probably felt the same way before. For example, when I see police cars hiding in “speed traps,” I often slam on my brakes, even when I’m not speeding. (Which is rare, I’ll admit.) I also tend to look at my speedometer as much I look at the road to make sure I’m going precisely 7 miles per hour over the speed limit. (Hey, that’s still legal, right?)
If you still don’t believe that traffic can proceed accident-free in the absence of traffic signals, check out the following video taken of the west end of the Champs-Élysées in Paris:
