China’s crazy car-straddling elevated is reportedly just a giant scam

After first trial the bus has just collected dust. Beijing police have arrested 30 people.

Read the whole story

 

[snowman<ca>]

It is amazing how many concepts for mass transit seem to be designed by people who never want to use it and the goal seems to be to get those people out of a space they could have cars. Even though a good mass transit system can serve many times the people a street for standard automobiles can.

 

[matthewslyman]

Told you so… 10th August 2016:

• Patented ideas? Wow. I'm fairly sure that Wacky Races has some prior art for cars on stilts…
• Perhaps the straddling bus makes a good "vehicle" for defrauding investors though. How is it going to turn corners? How collision resistant?

The amount of investment poured into this obvious scam demonstrates how rare a thing it is, to think before acting! "Buy in now, before it's too late!" — But for the never-ending, steady stream of such scams; we might suppose that the "investor" class would actually read psychology, marketing, security & criminology; before getting themselves up to their eyeballs in this! This case also demonstrates the fallacy of the idea that "survival of the fittest" leads to the most deserving people becoming wealthy enough to invest (or, getting into positions of power where they can make investment decisions).

In any case, trams on raised tracks (on concrete pillars), are better & more convenient to use, cheaper, and more readily available. There's no practical reason to replace that technology with this bizarre monstrosity!

 

[Faustus Scaevola]

People who invested in this basically deserved to get scammed. A promised 12% yearly return?

Journalists everywhere should feel ashamed though. Way too many hailed this as something revolutionary. Even the original Ars article after noticing all flaws inherent to the concept ended the new story with:

Still, it's an exciting concept. In countries with very specific infrastructure setups—or the wherewithal to make dramatic infrastructure changes to accommodate elevated buses—the TEB could revolutionise public transport.

Of course it couldn't.

 

[matthewslyman]

Faustus Scaevola[/url]":2o606ch5]People who invested in this basically deserved to get scammed. A promised 12% yearly return?

Journalists everywhere should feel ashamed though. Way too many hailed this as something revolutionary. Even the original Ars article after noticing all flaws inherent to the concept ended the new story with:

Still, it's an exciting concept. In countries with very specific infrastructure setups—or the wherewithal to make dramatic infrastructure changes to accommodate elevated buses—the TEB could revolutionise public transport.

Of course it couldn't.

To be fair, Ars Technica is operating in a litigious "business-friendly" journalistic environment. But I do agree that gushing shill language in the concluding paragraphs was neither warranted here, nor at "the" BBC. My recipe for avoiding litigation: stick to the facts. Many journalists solve this problem by asking questions, and leaving the answers dangling for the reader to think about.

 

[mrseb]

Faustus Scaevola[/url]":vog7rhl0]People who invested in this basically deserved to get scammed. A promised 12% yearly return?

Journalists everywhere should feel ashamed though. Way too many hailed this as something revolutionary. Even the original Ars article after noticing all flaws inherent to the concept ended the new story with:

Still, it's an exciting concept. In countries with very specific infrastructure setups—or the wherewithal to make dramatic infrastructure changes to accommodate elevated buses—the TEB could revolutionise public transport.

Of course it couldn't.

I stand by those comments! I still think elevated transport is a pretty good idea. It's cheaper than building tunnels.

You could totally imagine these things on long stretches of straight roads - the kind of roads that lead into major cities that are often congested. Kind of like autonomous lorry convoys. They're very effective - just only useful in quite specific scenarios.

 

[DriveBy]

If you're going to scam investors, isn't it kind of a prerequisite that you don't actually go ahead and build the thing?

 

[coolblue2000]

mrseb[/url]":1c4le24f]

Faustus Scaevola[/url]":1c4le24f]People who invested in this basically deserved to get scammed. A promised 12% yearly return?

Journalists everywhere should feel ashamed though. Way too many hailed this as something revolutionary. Even the original Ars article after noticing all flaws inherent to the concept ended the new story with:

Still, it's an exciting concept. In countries with very specific infrastructure setups—or the wherewithal to make dramatic infrastructure changes to accommodate elevated buses—the TEB could revolutionise public transport.

Of course it couldn't.

I stand by those comments! I still think elevated transport is a pretty good idea. It's cheaper than building tunnels.

You could totally imagine these things on long stretches of straight roads - the kind of roads that lead into major cities that are often congested. Kind of like autonomous lorry convoys. They're very effective - just only useful in quite specific scenarios.

Just how many of those perfectly straight roads are there? And how long are they? In my experience most are reasonably straight but still have some shallow bends.

Plus surely an elevated rail line would be more suitable as it is not restricted by bends and can therefore be more useful?

 

[matthewslyman]

mrseb[/url]":2502op7s]

Faustus Scaevola[/url]":2502op7s]People who invested in this basically deserved to get scammed. A promised 12% yearly return?

Journalists everywhere should feel ashamed though. Way too many hailed this as something revolutionary. Even the original Ars article after noticing all flaws inherent to the concept ended the new story with:

Still, it's an exciting concept. In countries with very specific infrastructure setups—or the wherewithal to make dramatic infrastructure changes to accommodate elevated buses—the TEB could revolutionise public transport.

Of course it couldn't.

I stand by those comments! I still think elevated transport is a pretty good idea. It's cheaper than building tunnels.

You could totally imagine these things on long stretches of straight roads - the kind of roads that lead into major cities that are often congested. Kind of like autonomous lorry convoys. They're very effective - just only useful in quite specific scenarios.

Your original concluding words (excerpt from above):

the TEB could revolutionise public transport

— Apparently, the TEB could revolutionise public transport. To some of us, it was obvious from the start (on cursory inspection), that it couldn't.
Elevated transport? Probably so. The TEB — never, it's an impractical use/configuration of space. It slices & dices the space around it into inconvenient three-dimensional units, as you allude to in part, when you mention that vehicles above a certain size must go around the TEB! There's no way to polish this poo: the TEB is dead: prior technologies (e.g. elevated tramways & railways) are superior in every way (don't forget that trains can have two decks — and for all the metal you might expend building barriers to protect a TEB, you might as well build rails!)

 

[dj__jg]

mrseb[/url]":2ct25c3n]

Faustus Scaevola[/url]":2ct25c3n]People who invested in this basically deserved to get scammed. A promised 12% yearly return?

Journalists everywhere should feel ashamed though. Way too many hailed this as something revolutionary. Even the original Ars article after noticing all flaws inherent to the concept ended the new story with:

Still, it's an exciting concept. In countries with very specific infrastructure setups—or the wherewithal to make dramatic infrastructure changes to accommodate elevated buses—the TEB could revolutionise public transport.

Of course it couldn't.

I stand by those comments! I still think elevated transport is a pretty good idea. It's cheaper than building tunnels.

You could totally imagine these things on long stretches of straight roads - the kind of roads that lead into major cities that are often congested. Kind of like autonomous lorry convoys. They're very effective - just only useful in quite specific scenarios.

Building railroads on top (as in, above them, to save space) of motorways or something, sure, but this specific road-straddling type system is just ridiculous. It might just be the luxury of being from a country where the infrastructure is pretty decent and where crazy ideas like this just aren't necessary, but I can't see this working well at all ever.

 

[TheNavvie]

coolblue2000[/url]":cjpujxfp]

mrseb[/url]":cjpujxfp]

Faustus Scaevola[/url]":cjpujxfp]People who invested in this basically deserved to get scammed. A promised 12% yearly return?

Journalists everywhere should feel ashamed though. Way too many hailed this as something revolutionary. Even the original Ars article after noticing all flaws inherent to the concept ended the new story with:

Still, it's an exciting concept. In countries with very specific infrastructure setups—or the wherewithal to make dramatic infrastructure changes to accommodate elevated buses—the TEB could revolutionise public transport.

Of course it couldn't.

I stand by those comments! I still think elevated transport is a pretty good idea. It's cheaper than building tunnels.

You could totally imagine these things on long stretches of straight roads - the kind of roads that lead into major cities that are often congested. Kind of like autonomous lorry convoys. They're very effective - just only useful in quite specific scenarios.

Just how many of those perfectly straight roads are there? And how long are they? In my experience most are reasonably straight but still have some shallow bends.

Plus surely an elevated rail line would be more suitable as it is not restricted by bends and can therefore be more useful?

Elevated rail line.... Monorail?

 

[matthewslyman]

Another nail in the TEB's coffin: long, straight, wide roads chock-full of low-occupancy personal vehicles are only common in a few countries (this creates extremely adverse conditions for poor economies of scale and unreliable+expensive supply-chains). Many cities are constrained by topology. The TEB design looks like it can't even handle a variable gradient! So the number of cities where it will work, are inherently very limited. There's no easy way to fix the design, in either of these respects (without substantially narrowing the design and introducing bogeys and buffers/linkages between carriages). Trams, on the other hand, were designed almost from the outset to solve these very problems! Supply chains are established, and the technology is economically available.

I'm not writing this as a retrospective criticism of Mr. Sebastian Anthony, or anybody else. More like, as a way of explaining a methodology of thinking that enabled me to predict from the outset that this was a scam!

 

[matthewslyman]

DriveBy[/url]":190sfrxt]If you're going to scam investors, isn't it kind of a prerequisite that you don't actually go ahead and build the thing?

Prototypes are actually fairly common ways to make scams more convincing. Too many investors seem to think that if there's a prototype, then it must be real. This example is case-in-point that this rule doesn't work! Caveat emptor.

 

[Spudley]

Faustus Scaevola[/url]":rfvah4bs]People who invested in this basically deserved to get scammed. A promised 12% yearly return?

A 12% ROI on a company with an innovative product is certainly not unreasonable if you think the product will be successful.

And honestly, this is in China, where even now with things looking a bit weak, the economy is still growing by around 6 - 7%, so 12% ROI should be considered perfectly reasonable.

The product itself does indeed have some obvious flaws, but it's reasonable as an investor to anticipate that these could be ironed out in development (there are workable solutions to most of the main ones if you stop to think about it), and it does have one major advantage over a roadside monorail on the same track footprint -- floorspace. If you're worried about your trains getting overcrowded, this thing would surely fix that for you.

The other thing that would have made this look a very tempting investment was the rapid expansion of China's infrastructure. There is a *lot* of investment going into metro systems across the country (see https://www.curbed.com/2017/5/22/156732 ... growth-map for a good visualisation of the pace they're building at); a new entrant into that industry would have had a good chance of making big money if they'd managed to get even a single contract to build a real line.

I'm not disputing whether it's a scam or just a failure; I'll leave that argument to the courts; but I do think you're all being a bit too disparaging about the investors. It's easy to mock the product as unworkable now with hindsight, but many things that have succeeded could have been equally mocked if they'd failed ("you invested in Tesla? hah! what made you think they'd be able to compete in the auto industry?"). Investing is inherently risky; that's kinda the whole point -- high risk; high return.

 

[benwiggy]

Surely it can't be that much of a scam, as they actually had to build a huge straddling bus thing with the money they got in?
That's a considerable ... overhead. (Sorry).

 

[kisunssi]

mrseb[/url]":2eqad776]I stand by those comments! I still think elevated transport is a pretty good idea.

Your commute awaits, Sir...

Spoiler

 

[kisunssi]

Spudley[/url]":2ggrspac]

Faustus Scaevola[/url]":2ggrspac]People who invested in this basically deserved to get scammed. A promised 12% yearly return?

A 12% ROI on a company with an innovative product is certainly not unreasonable if you think the product will be successful.
...

I'm not disputing whether it's a scam or just a failure; I'll leave that argument to the courts; but I do think you're all being a bit too disparaging about the investors. It's easy to mock the product as unworkable now with hindsight, but many things that have succeeded could have been equally mocked if they'd failed ("you invested in Tesla? hah! what made you think they'd be able to compete in the auto industry?"). Investing is inherently risky; that's kinda the whole point -- high risk; high return.

I'm not sure if Tesla is the best example. It has a pretty stratospheric market capitalisation, granted; but...

Does Tesla pay a dividend? Does it plan to?

Tesla has never declared dividends on our common stock. We intend on retaining all future earnings to finance future growth and therefore, do not anticipate paying any cash dividends in the foreseeable future.

And the consensus opinion seems to be that the company is unlikely to turn a full-year profit anytime soon either.

As you say, investing is inherently risky.

 

[DanNeely]

Semi-OT, asking because it confused me when I saw it in the text: How/Why did the Yuan end up with the same currency symbol as the Yen? For as much as China dislikes Japan (to put i mildly); I'd've assumed they'd come up with a distinct symbol as a matter of national pride.

 

[Fritzr]

TheNavvie[/url]":3djr8pry]

coolblue2000[/url]":3djr8pry]

mrseb[/url]":3djr8pry]

Faustus Scaevola[/url]":3djr8pry]People who invested in this basically deserved to get scammed. A promised 12% yearly return?

Journalists everywhere should feel ashamed though. Way too many hailed this as something revolutionary. Even the original Ars article after noticing all flaws inherent to the concept ended the new story with:

Still, it's an exciting concept. In countries with very specific infrastructure setups—or the wherewithal to make dramatic infrastructure changes to accommodate elevated buses—the TEB could revolutionise public transport.

Of course it couldn't.

I stand by those comments! I still think elevated transport is a pretty good idea. It's cheaper than building tunnels.

You could totally imagine these things on long stretches of straight roads - the kind of roads that lead into major cities that are often congested. Kind of like autonomous lorry convoys. They're very effective - just only useful in quite specific scenarios.

Just how many of those perfectly straight roads are there? And how long are they? In my experience most are reasonably straight but still have some shallow bends.

Plus surely an elevated rail line would be more suitable as it is not restricted by bends and can therefore be more useful?

Elevated rail line.... Monorail?

Also El trains ... same concept with standard rails on top of the elevated platform carrying the track. Major advantage to an El is that they can transition from elevated to surface to subway with all 3 modes using identical carriages.

 

[kisunssi]

DanNeely[/url]":2xx99q5i]Semi-OT, asking because it confused me when I saw it in the text: How/Why did the Yuan end up with the same currency symbol as the Yen? For as much as China dislikes Japan (to put i mildly); I'd've assumed they'd come up with a distinct symbol as a matter of national pride.

I'm not sure how they both came to use the ¥ symbol, although both yuan and yen - along with the Korean won, ₩ - derive from the same root and share the same traditional character, 圓. I assume it is similar to the widespread use of the $ symbol for various currencies?

 

[Smithy]

This scheme is so Chinese. It was never started to produce anything. It was simply a scam to make money off gullible investors. So so common in China. Scamming is an industry here ( I am a Chinese resident ).

 

[Fritzr]

DanNeely[/url]":x5hohv4f]Semi-OT, asking because it confused me when I saw it in the text: How/Why did the Yuan end up with the same currency symbol as the Yen? For as much as China dislikes Japan (to put i mildly); I'd've assumed they'd come up with a distinct symbol as a matter of national pride.

It went the other way. The chinese currency symbol for "circle/money" is used to represent currency. The Japanese adopted many Chinese characters for use in writing the Japanese language.

In written Chinese the word is 圓 (Traditional) or 圆 (Simplified) or 元 (parts of Mainland China and Taiwan New Dollar) and in Japanese Shinjitai: 円 It is pronounced yuán in Mandarin Chinese and en in Japanese.

Like $ (dollar/dolar/thaler/peso), it is a case of the currency symbol being assigned to the name of the currency (circle) rather than to a particular national currency.
(The Spanish peso was called Spanish dollar in 18th century English)

The ¥ symbol was created by taking the first letter of the Latin spelling of the two currencies that were represented by Chinese characters, Yuan & Yen and adding the cross bars that are commonly used on currency symbols. The symbol can be written with one or two crossbars in the same manner as the dollar sign.

Sources
XE.com currency symbols

The Word "Dollar" and the Dollar Sign $

Why Is The Dollar Sign A Letter S?]

[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yen_sign]Wiki Yen sign

 

[greevar]

I would think installing a monorail in the median of a divided highway would be better than this.

 

[schubert.konstantin]

The thing is that every revolutionary public transport system has to beat light rail in speed or buses in cost. That's just very hard.

 

[aleph_nought]

schubert.konstantin[/url]":1o0odtog]The thing is that every revolutionary public transport system has to beat light rail in speed or buses in cost. That's just very hard.

My idea of a good public transport system - trams or buses for local transport, light rail for traveling across the city, with small electric cars and bicycles for short distance point-to-point journeys. Dedicated lanes for buses and bikes would be great.

Driving in China is a nightmare because so many road users don't have a f-k-g clue about proper road safety and etiquette. Cars will run red lights and won't ever wait for pedestrians while pedestrians, bicyclists and moped riders do whatever the hell they want.

 

[DStaal]

coolblue2000[/url]":3prfwaky]

mrseb[/url]":3prfwaky]

Faustus Scaevola[/url]":3prfwaky]People who invested in this basically deserved to get scammed. A promised 12% yearly return?

Journalists everywhere should feel ashamed though. Way too many hailed this as something revolutionary. Even the original Ars article after noticing all flaws inherent to the concept ended the new story with:

Still, it's an exciting concept. In countries with very specific infrastructure setups—or the wherewithal to make dramatic infrastructure changes to accommodate elevated buses—the TEB could revolutionise public transport.

Of course it couldn't.

I stand by those comments! I still think elevated transport is a pretty good idea. It's cheaper than building tunnels.

You could totally imagine these things on long stretches of straight roads - the kind of roads that lead into major cities that are often congested. Kind of like autonomous lorry convoys. They're very effective - just only useful in quite specific scenarios.

Just how many of those perfectly straight roads are there? And how long are they? In my experience most are reasonably straight but still have some shallow bends.

Plus surely an elevated rail line would be more suitable as it is not restricted by bends and can therefore be more useful?

An elevated rail line does have the problem of requiring more investment in infrastructure. A well-designed version of this could probably work with just the medians of the roads already in existence.

The turning and height problems are solvable - especially if you work special cases as initial production. (I can see it as a decent bus for airports and theme parks, for instance - and then the roads it's on can have restricted vehicle height.) It's definitely an interesting idea, and one that's not completely flawed, although this particular prototype doesn't attempt to solve some of the harder issues.

 

[Bondi Surfer]

A non-elevated bus would work much better - no prototype required, no additional infrastructure, easily scaled, can have seats for everyone...

 

[Tsa Szymborska]

Deleted

 

[sonolumi]

Bondi Surfer[/url]":2rscy1q2]A non-elevated bus would work much better - no prototype required, no additional infrastructure, easily scaled, can have seats for everyone...

You'd think (and I do get your joke). While in no way endorsing this crackpot bus on stilts fiasco, the fact of the matter is buses need at least some dedicated infrastructure or they fall foul of the same congestion as every other road user. See most busy UK cities with an aging road network and various clusterfuck traffic mismanagement "solutions" for evidence.

 

[0bliv!on]

mrseb[/url]":2edc32u3]

Faustus Scaevola[/url]":2edc32u3]People who invested in this basically deserved to get scammed. A promised 12% yearly return?

Journalists everywhere should feel ashamed though. Way too many hailed this as something revolutionary. Even the original Ars article after noticing all flaws inherent to the concept ended the new story with:

Still, it's an exciting concept. In countries with very specific infrastructure setups—or the wherewithal to make dramatic infrastructure changes to accommodate elevated buses—the TEB could revolutionise public transport.

Of course it couldn't.

I stand by those comments! I still think elevated transport is a pretty good idea. It's cheaper than building tunnels.

You could totally imagine these things on long stretches of straight roads - the kind of roads that lead into major cities that are often congested. Kind of like autonomous lorry convoys. They're very effective - just only useful in quite specific scenarios.

Wait, was the previous article an ARTICLE, or an editorial?

I like Ars. It's one of the more professional (by a rather large margin) tech-sci news sites. But there's a rather clear and distinctive line between news reporting and editorialising, a line that's well-established, which involves the difference between "objective facts" (even the fact of the OPINION of others), and the opinion of the author of the piece.

 

[charleski]

Faustus Scaevola[/url]":1x954t36]People who invested in this basically deserved to get scammed. A promised 12% yearly return?

This is China. From 1979 to 1993 the baseline return on investment was 25%, and from '98 to 2005 it stabilised at 20%. Guranteeing a return is a bit suspect, but 12% is not especially remarkable in the context of China's overall 7% GDP growth.

 

[0bliv!on]

charleski[/url]":37kw7uy6]

Faustus Scaevola[/url]":37kw7uy6]People who invested in this basically deserved to get scammed. A promised 12% yearly return?

This is China. From 1979 to 1993 the baseline return on investment was 25%, and from '98 to 2005 it stabilised at 20%. Guranteeing a return is a bit suspect, but 12% is not especially remarkable in the context of China's overall 7% GDP growth.

The problems with both China's emerging stock market and property market are well known and not quite yet fixed (daily trading halts not really being a 'fix'), and has everyone from the Chinese Central Bank to outside observers in near-constant fear of a crash. So far, that group just doesn't include the growing Chinese middle/upper-middle class who're fueling the boom, but just because they don't see a bubble doesn't mean it isn't there. On the other hand, the handwringing doesn't mean it IS a bubble either, so I guess time will tell.

I guess my point really is - the promised 12% returns DO sound very much like a pyramid-scheme/scam, but you're also right that the numbers from China's investment environment ALL look like pyramid schemes/scams, but THAT in turn may well be because a large section of China's current invesment market IS a pyramid scheme (i.e. returns mainly from influxes of new cash and not from actual production/revenue/profit).

 

[mrsilver]

Smithy[/url]":1y15afye]This scheme is so Chinese. It was never started to produce anything. It was simply a scam to make money off gullible investors. So so common in China. Scamming is an industry here ( I am a Chinese resident ).

Maybe I'm being hopelessly naive here, but they built an actual full size product.

Surely if this was a typical scam, shouldn't they have just taken the money and ran?

If your sole goal is to milk some gulliable investors, why would you go to the effort of building anything beyond a scale model to be used as part of the sales pitch?

 

[matthewslyman]

mrsilver[/url]":11nns0dr]

Smithy[/url]":11nns0dr]This scheme is so Chinese. It was never started to produce anything. It was simply a scam to make money off gullible investors. So so common in China. Scamming is an industry here ( I am a Chinese resident ).

Maybe I'm being hopelessly naive here, but they built an actual full size product.

Surely if this was a typical scam, shouldn't they have just taken the money and ran?

If your sole goal is to milk some gulliable investors, why would you go to the effort of building anything beyond a scale model to be used as part of the sales pitch?

Simple. They wouldn't have got so much "investment" money if they had not built a prototype. The prototype's purpose was merely to amplify the effectiveness of the scam!

With most people, if they'd seen this thing on a drawing board or computer screen, they would have laughed out loud. But seeing the thing in real life — seven metres wide and five metres tall — is designed to shock people enough to overcome their natural skepticism. It stops them from asking certain questions about practicality, in the first place. Due diligence then tends to take short-cuts (psychologically, this is how the brain often works: take the path of least resistance, and don't bother asking questions that already seem to have been answered.)
This is why every investment bank should consider employing an autistic person as a member of most teams — with the power to ask tough questions, and the power to apply the brakes where there are unanswered concerns; because certain types of autistic people tend to model things out in their brains: they don't take the same mental short-cuts, or make the same assumptions: they may be less vulnerable to deception than most normal people, if you just give them a little time to think through key strategic decisions. Alternatively, investment banks might consider setting up a "red" team of autistic people to challenge investment decisions being made by others.

 

[Null_Space]

I'm shocked. Shocked

 

[BevansDesign]

Punish scammers? What a novel concept. Here in America, we elect them president.

 

[Sarty]

You could totally imagine these things on long stretches of straight roads - the kind of roads that lead into major cities that are often congested. Kind of like autonomous lorry convoys. They're very effective - just only useful in quite specific scenarios.

You're basically doubling the loading gauge of whatever right of way you want to leverage. So now you need to have long, straight, high-use stretches of road that have no bridges or other height-limitations above them. Which seems like a pretty short list; if you've got a high-use length of road, it probably already has a lot of grade-separated crossings, because that's what you do in high-volume areas. You build crossings.

Of course, this system requires absolute gridlock underneath to have any purpose at all. Otherwise, you've just invented the double-height bus, and said a system that's twice as tall can carry twice as many people. This latter is not a very transformative concept.

 

[Megabeard]

Ahhh.... China. Trying so hard to look like the most advanced country ever.

 

[zenlistener]

Scam or not, I think Austin, TX should buy it and run it up and down I35.

 

[Whiner42]

Transit scam torpedoed by oh-so-trivial reality? Imagine.

Next up: The Hyperloop.

Fanboys, grab your wallets.