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.

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Faustus Scaevola[/url]":25e6w83s]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!)

Go to Queens in New York or the El in Chicago and see what an elevated railway is like. It darkens the street and gives a distinctly dystopia feel of the neighborhood. It’s why all El lines in Manhattan were eliminated.

Besides, there’s the cost of building miles and miles of elevated track. What would be the cost per mile?

The TEB solved some of these problems. Building a TEB track is way cheaper than building an El. Apparently, it can turn, but traffic must stop and wait. And height restrictions are quite common. Many Brooklyn and Queens streets with Els have height restrictions on them.

This doesn’t mean this wasn’t some sort of scam. However, you don’t build a working mockup with a scam. You do nothing more expensive than a four colored brochure.

I don’t think the intesntion was to scam. It sounds more likely that this was over promised and way more expensive than the backers realized.