Bus

Love them or hate them, bendy buses are impressive. You see one coming around a corner looking like an ordinary bus, then comes the articulated bit and then more bus. Now the unveiling in Dresden, Germany of the AutoTram Extra Grand raises the bar with a bendy bus that’s more like a bendy train. With three sections, measuring over 30 meters (100 ft) long and a passenger capacity of 256, it’s the world’s longest bus.  Read More

Like the rest of us, the blind can use speaking navigation apps to find their way around the city. A new Android application developed at Spain’s Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, however, is designed specifically to help blind people get to their destination by bus. Appropriately named OnTheBus, the app could also be used by the deaf, the cognitively-impaired, or anyone else.  Read More

The Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG) has claimed a world first by deploying electric buses on a commercial route. Previous electric bus operations have all been trials, or in the case of Expo 2010 in Shanghai, free public services. The buses went into service on December 21 after an 18 month development project with Hyundai Heavy Industries and Hankuk Fiber.  Read More

The giant Straddling Bus we reported on earlier this year could be headed to the U.S. This week the inventor of the bus, Mr. Song Youzhou, announced that his Shenzhen-based company is aiming to form partnerships or licensing agreements with specialized manufacturers to build the vehicle for the American market. Designed as a way to reduce traffic snarls without the need for much in the way of new infrastructure, the “Elevated High-Speed Bus” straddles two lanes of traffic allowing cars to drive underneath.  Read More

Finding room for green spaces in more and more crowded cities isn’t easy but NYU graduate student Marco Castro Cosio has hit upon the idea of planting gardens on some previously wasted space found on city streets – the roofs of buses. With New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) running a fleet of around 4,500 buses, each with a surface area of 340 square feet (31.5 m2), Cosio says that if a garden was grown on the roof of every one, there would be an extra 35 acres of rolling green space in the city.  Read More

Looking more like a futuristic stretch limo than a bus, the Superbus is a 15-meter long vehicle that provides seating for 23 passengers who can embark and disembark via its 16 gull-wing doors (eight on each side). The electric bus runs on four E2M electric motors powered by rechargeable batteries with its highly streamlined shape and lightweight construction designed to keep energy consumption down as it hurtles along at 155 mph.  Read More

Great Britain's first amphibious bus service has hit a slight snag in testing - a component failure halting the Stagecoach Amphibious Bus in its third crossing of the river Clyde between Renfrew and Yoker in Scotland. Proposed as a replacement for a ferry service that's set to close down next month, the "amfibus" is designed to deliver a 'seamless' trip across the Clyde with minimal transition time between its regular coach mode and jet-powered water crossing mode.  Read More

There’s no better way to test the realities of hybrid technology than with public transport, where significant reductions in fuel consumption and emissions are not just desirable, but a commercial necessity. London got a little greener this week with the delivery of six new Volvo B5L hybrid double-decker buses to Arriva London. The new buses are powered by Volvo’s parallel hybrid I-SAM technology which, used on bus routes in Gothenburg, Sweden, has delivered fuel savings of 30%.  Read More