The New York Times, among others, has publicized a claimed test run of the “straddling bus,” aka “transit elevated bus” (TEB), that promises to relieve congestion by “floating” above regular traffic. In fact, it was less of a test drive than a publicity stunt, moving a vehicle at 6 miles per hour on a few hundred feet of test track, not on a real city street or highway.
Supposedly, the advantage of these 300-passenger behemoths (or 1,200 if four are hooked together) is that, unlike rail transit, they can be added to a city without building a lot of new infrastructure. But that’s a lie. The vehicles themselves run on tracks, and they weigh so much–upwards of 100 tons–that such tracks will be expensive to install. As Wired points out, it “is not a bus. . . it is a train.” (Technically, it is a railcar; it only becomes a train when two or more are hooked together, but you get the point.)
