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Chinese plan for “traffic-straddling bus” ended after 32 people were arrested
- GoToRO 9y agoJust ban cars. It's not that hard. We banned horses, why not cars?
- dec0dedab0de 9y agowhen did horses get banned?
- GoToRO 9y agoDepends on your location. In my country they are banned on highways, national roads and cities or in other words in all those places in which cars rule.
- gpvos 9y agoWell, in the Netherlands and I think most other European countries, they are banned on car-only roads (i.e., motorways and expressways; autosnelweg and autoweg in Dutch). Elsewhere, including cities, they are allowed.
- manarth 9y ago2007, in Romania [1][2]. More specifically, horse-drawn carts were banned. From what I can see, the movement to ban them stems from an argument that horse-drawn carts/carriages are a form of animal cruelty [3]. I haven't seen anything that singles out/bans horses (with riders, rather than carriages) though. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/nadiaarumugam/2013/02/14/the-romanian-horse-cart-ban-thats-probably-behind-europes-horse-meat-scandal/#3ad89e937d4f https://www.forbes.com/sites/nadiaarumugam/2013/02/14/the-ro... [2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1578965/Horses-left-to-starve-after-Romania-bans-carts.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1578965/Horses-lef... [3] https://www.peta.org/issues/animals-in-entertainment/horse-drawn-carriages/ https://www.peta.org/issues/animals-in-entertainment/horse-d...
- nickrio 9y agoI thought horses was banned because they ... produce some unwanted mass on the road which hard to clean? Cars on the other hand, don't do that at all. Maybe that's the reason why cars are not banned.
- alistairSH 9y agoHorse poop degrades fairly rapidly (relative to omnivore and carnivore excrement). Doesn't smell as bad either. Cars produce all sorts of chemical compounds that ruin the air we breath.
- astrodust 9y agoNo. It doesn't degrade rapidly. It stays there for weeks unless there's rain. It does smell bad. Hitting a fresh one is a cyclists worst nightmare. I'm not saying cars are innocent here, but at least they don't poop.
- bhouston 9y agoNon-electric cars will be banned in most inner cities probably within the decade because of their pollution, sort of a parallel with how horses were banned earlier.
- astrodust 9y agoHorses were banned? Here you just need a horse-drawn carriage license, but good luck getting one.
- pjc50 9y agoHorses were never banned (except maybe locally), they're just far more expensive and difficult to run than cars.
- babyrainbow 9y agoYes. But cars produce unwanted mess in atmosphere that in almost impossible to clean..
- 9y ago
- corobo 9y agoNot sure where you are but here in the UK it's quite legal to ride a horse or drive a horse with a carriage of some kind on the road. The carriage needs to be "road worthy" but aside from that you don't even need a license of any kind unless you're transporting passengers. It's just not very fast compared to modern cars and quite expensive so not as many people do it. Edit: Oh one minor mostly common sense note - You can't ride/drive horses on the motorway and probably shouldn't on faster roads or dual carriageways due to the rest of the traffic going far faster than you.
- GoToRO 9y agoIn my country they are banned on highways, national roads, cities. I was referring to that. I think banning them on congested roads will increase the demand for public transport which is what we should have on those road anyway.
- openasocket 9y agoYou want to ban cars on congested roads? Isn't that a paradox? If cars are banned on a road then it won't be congested anymore, so cars will be allowed on it, then it will get congested so cars get banned ... in the end I think what you're suggesting is running around giving tickets to people in traffic jams. Also, in what country did they ban horses?
- viraptor 9y agoThat's taking the idea to absurd extreme. You don't flip-flop the law every day. London for example has a congestion zone around the main city, which involves multiple limits and in many places removed congestion. This doesn't mean those areas are free for all again - the zone remains to keep out / reduce the congestion which would otherwise come back.
- openasocket 9y agoIn my defense, the OP said "banning cars." In London to deal with congestion they basically just turn large sections of the city into a toll road. That's pretty different than "banning cars"
- technofiend 9y ago"We" did? Who is "we"? >"Every person having control or charge of a vehicle shall, whenever upon any way and approaching any horse, drive, manage, and control such vehicle in such a manner as to exercise every reasonable precaution to prevent the frightening of such horse, and to insure the safety and protection of any person riding or driving the same." That's the law (for instance) in New Hampshire. The same article (the very first link when I search for "horse street legal united states") http://cs.thehorse.com/blogs/horses-and-the-law/archive/2012/01/24/Rules-Of-The-Road.aspx http://cs.thehorse.com/blogs/horses-and-the-law/archive/2012... further states >Traffic laws in a few states, including Colorado, Michigan, and New Mexico, specifically state that horses have all the rights and obligations of other vehicles when they are being ridden or driven on a public highway. Everywhere else, except in states like Louisiana where it appears to be illegal to ride a horse on a paved road, riders and drivers probably enjoy similar rights and obligations by implication. >Some states prohibit specific conduct when riding on a highway: It is illegal to ride a horse at night in New Mexico; to cross bridges at a gait faster than a walk in Idaho, Mississippi, and Pennsylvania; to ride or drive a horse "recklessly" in Nevada; to race or run horses on a highway in Kentucky, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, or New Jersey; to ride on a levee in Kentucky; and to ride on interstate highways in several states. Horses should be ridden on the right-hand side of the road, going with the flow of traffic, almost everywhere except Colorado, where riders must ride on the left. Sorry but I don't think you know what you're talking about, you're not in the United States, or you failed to specify enough context so that in that limited situation your statement is true. At the very least you failed to make a simple Google search for a sweeping generalization that is demonstrably not true.
- GoToRO 9y agoHold your horses! It's just a comment on internet and I didn't think I had to treat all edge cases :)) Also, if you don't have enough context for something it doesn't mean you should pick any random context...
- technofiend 9y agoWithout any context the entire world is your edge case, mate. Sorry if I'm being a bit pedantic but HN is not Reddit.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoHorses aren't banned. If you spend some time in a big city, they're everywhere. Police ride them, people ride them, people use them to pull carts and pull other people. The horses are always less useful than machines, but they exist.
- profmonocle 9y agoHorses declined after a better option - cars - were widely available and accepted. I'm all for coming up with a better solution, but if you ban cars before we have that solution you'll effectively shut down civilization in much of the developed world.
- 27182818284 9y agoChina doing a massive ban-change to vehicles wouldn't be a first. Friedman wrote about their policy shifts in Hot, Flat, and Crowded. China has implemented changes to vehicle emissions in just a few years that took the US decades (e.g. unleaded gas). So, okay, they won't ban cars outright, but it isn't impossible to imagine other scenarios that would be impossible to imagine the US doing in the same time period.
- GordonS 9y agoIf nothing else, this always seemed like utter madness from a safety perspective.
- maze-le 9y agoI bet people had the same thing to say about cars in the early 20th century (not without some justification though).
- specializeded 9y agoStill have them today... Driving home last night, I tried to imagine how many of the people next to me on the road were drunk while riding their 2 ton steel horses home.
- GordonS 9y agoAs a Brit, the cavalier attitude to drink-driving in the USA never ceased to amaze me.
- puranjay 9y agoI'd love to see accident rates for horse riders vs. car drivers.
- komali2 9y agoWell the cool thing about horses is they're technically self-driving. You can fall asleep on a well-trained horse and it'll get you both home. If you're driving distracted and are headed straight for a tree, the horse typically won't smash itself into a tree. When surrounded by lots of other horses (in a charge, for example), the horses will run as if they were in a herd and won't trample eachother.
- delecti 9y agoYour caveat invalidates your point. Motor vehicles are a big cause of death in many countries.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Luc 9y ago"China's Vision", I mean, come on. There seems to be some opinion leaking into the title.
- bhouston 9y agoIt was just the vision of a bunch of hustler/entrepreneurs. It seemed too easy to hit with large vehicles and a death trap for vehicles underneath it. An elevated rail system seemed so much easier and without the difficulties that this introduced. But an elevated rail system required significantly more investment thus it had to be city sanctioned in a large way, rather than the minimal investments this required.
- wavefunction 9y agoI imagine the turning radius for this thing is significant enough that you'd have to tear out existing intersections and even push the buildings back from where they exist now. Just so it can turn. I think in this specific comparison elevated light rail would be significantly less-disruptive and cheaper too.
- evansj 9y agoThey just need to install a giant turntable at every intersection!
- reality_czech 9y agoIt would be better if they installed two turntables and a microphone.
- tianshuo 9y agoTheir only demo went back and forth for 200 meters, and nothing happened ever after. SCAM SCAM SCAM SCAM, there is no way for the bus to turn except for tearing down infrastructure and using 10 lanes. The creators made a fund out of the project(promised 12% annualized return) that attracted a lot of small investors and scammed them out of their money.
- m3kw9 9y agoAnything that promises a rate higher than what govt can promise is a scam. Ie tbills
- cesarb 9y agoHaving a higher rate than what the government gives you just means it has more risk, not necessarily that it's a scam. And 12% isn't that high, it was a common annualized rate of return a few years ago here in Brazil.
- TomMarius 9y agoYeah well in some European countries, there is a negative return now - the government is essentially saying "pay us for keeping your money".
- kogepathic 9y ago> the government is essentially saying "pay us for keeping your money". Yes, but the real message here is "we'd rather you spend your money than save it, so we're going to charge you money to keep it with us" The whole point of a negative interest rate is to try and drive up spending/investment. If it costs money for banks to keep their deposits in the central bank, then there's (theoretically) more incentive for the banks to loan the money to someone. It's meant to be a means of economic stimulus, and the government isn't the one setting the negative interest rate, that would be the central bank (in Europe's case, the ECB).
- 9y ago
- tyingq 9y agoIntersections and cars under the bus wanting to turn left or right would be interesting. Dedicated turn lanes helps a little, but you would have to trail or lead the bus to see them coming soon enough.
- rasz 9y agoBicycle sharing companies are next I guess, give it a year or two. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdsb2wwn-7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdsb2wwn-7g
- averagewall 9y agoWhat worries me about the bike shares is they all take a 100-200 rmb refundable deposit from each user. That's an unsecured interest free "crowdsourced" loan! If the company collapses, it's riders' deposits that'll go down the toilet.
- baybal2 9y agoYes, they used to be deposit free, but once bigger ones started demanding them, all of them did too. Now, their business model is effectively that of a bank.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoThere was an article in chinadaily a while back in how the government was forcing the bike companies to deposit these deposits in a special account. So it might not be as bad as that, but I wouldn't expect to get my deposit back either.
- aembleton 9y agoMaybe when you've got too many of them, but Mobike has just arrived in Manchester, UK and I've tried it a couple of times. I really like it and am impressed with how well it actually works. They just need to deploy more bikes so that it is easier for me to find one during busy periods.
- lawless123 9y agoA tram would be much safer and probably cause less disruption.
- astrodust 9y agoA "tram" is also a proven technology that doesn't get investors. A traffic straddling bus is one of those "so crazy it just might work" ideas that gets funding.
- timwaagh 9y agostill seems a decent idea to me. maybe something went wrong in the execution here, but it could be a solution for densely packed historical urban centers that do not wish to tear down too many buildings.
- gumby 9y agoBTW this isn't the original headline (the error in the rewrite caused me to click on the title). NYT would have written this in the indefinite present: "Chinese plan for “traffic-straddling bus” ends with 32 arrests." Except it didn't end, and the NYT headline says so.
- Dylan16807 9y agoWhat do you mean? It ended a while ago.
- gumby 9y agoNot sure what you mean. Either the project is effectively dead, or ended, after the arrests, or its technically continuing though for all intents and purposes is over. Or it ended a while ago and that's why it's a scam? The article as up right now has a title that says it's over, but did not have the same headline when I added my comment :-(. Also says it's effectively over as a result of the arrests which it didn't before. Unfortunately the NYT does not have a policy of always indicating edits. So this may have made my comment look odd. However FWIW the NYT typically won't use the past tense, and in particular the perfect, for topics which are ongoing. US Civil war? Sure. Bernie Madoff? Possibly, possibly not, depending. People having just been arrested gets a present, or at best imperfect tense.
- jlebrech 9y agowhy don't we have low altitude blimps? ones that pick up a car and drop it off between the car's destination and the next customer? or pull it by cable using a filtering bike of sorts?
- ams6110 9y agoFrom the photos it looks like this thing runs on tracks. OK, this concept was invented a century ago in cities like Chicago, it's called an Elevated Train.
- 99_00 9y agoInteresting to to compare the comments now versus then https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12214675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12214675
- Animats 9y agoThey actually built a prototype? Renders of that thing have been around for years. I'd wondered if the track system would be designed into one of China's new cities. It would have been the largest mobile passenger vehicle since the German Imperial Gauge Railway.[1] The CGI videos of it cornering show the sections bending, which only works in CGI.[2][3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breitspurbahn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breitspurbahn [2] https://youtu.be/vaUTIIggEis?t=131 https://youtu.be/vaUTIIggEis?t=131 [3] https://youtu.be/vaUTIIggEis?t=138 https://youtu.be/vaUTIIggEis?t=138
- macawfish 9y agoIf this was a scam... what does that make the hyperloop?
- diyseguy 9y agoToo bad, I was picturing this as another way for Amazon to deliver packages or perhaps snacks to people (while waiting in traffic)