Look, up in the sky! It's a bus! It's a train!

[Mudkip Orange]

It's Nagoya Guideway Bus!

 

 

And here I thought the "BRT" guys only had influence in english-speaking countries...

[disturbman]

Bah... we have the same thing in Paris, we just call it "subway" and it's a tad more capacitious. 

[Mudkip Orange]

Front view (I hesitate to use the term "cab ride" for a bus) from Ozone (western terminal) to Moriyama, and from Shirasawakeikoku to the eastern ramp where buses exit the guideway to surface streets.

 

The "hump" in the guideway at about 5:00 is where the bus crosses the Meitetsu Seto Line. I'm guessing it's there to allow for future elevation of the Seto Line, which currently intersects the street under the bus guideway at a level crossing.

 

The video snip from Moriyama to Shirasawakeikoku occurs at 5:42 in.

 

[Kabutoni]

Hmmm... I've heard there is a somewhat similar concept in Essen here. In Australia there is a derivation of this same concept as well. I think it was called O-Bus or something like that.

[qwertyaardvark]

BRTs are definitely alive in places that don't speak english :P I recall riding one in China, Changzhou was the name of the town me thinks....

 

BRT Station in Changzhou

 

And one of the busses:

 

For an extra large version of the (model) bus, click here.

 

But an elevated track just for buses??? interesting concept... i presume its cheaper to build structure for a much lighter bus (cf train) and you dont need to lay/maintain track...

[disturbman]

I think I allready saw some pitures of a real BRT viaduct (here it's a guided bus).

 

Just in case, BRT was invented in Curitiba Brazil and it's the new very in transportation mean.

 

The VAL (first Matra and then Siemens product) was the first fully automatic subway. It's a very light "train" that runs on a concret infrastructure. it doesn't have metalic wheels but tyres and, unlike Paris subway  which the VAL is derivated from, the infrastructure is not equiped with any railway tracks.

[westfalen]

Hmmm... I've heard there is a somewhat similar concept in Essen here. In Australia there is a derivation of this same concept as well. I think it was called O-Bus or something like that.

You'd be thinking of Adelaide's O-Bahn. There is a similar movement here in Brisbane with busways and huge, dedicated stations but without the tracks. I always think it a bit ironic that for buses to be successful they have to imitate trains.

[Mudkip Orange]

I always think it a bit ironic that for buses to be successful they have to imitate trains.

 

Bolded for truthiness.

[CaptOblivious]

My wife and I had exactly the same thought while traversing the various bus depots in Brisbane this summer. The Queen Street Mall station is particularly puzzling to us, as was the station across the river by the art museum. Why not, we thought, use light rail? The only answer we could come up with is that Brisbane is perhaps still young and experimenting with transit, and buses are very good for cities that think they will change their mind. But then, the depots suggest permanence…

[KenS]

I expect there's a maintenance cost aspect. Tires are cheap (relatively) and concrete just sits there for decades, but rail needs to be inspected (weekly or so) and maintained (checked for cracks using ultrasonics, re-ground every few years, replaced every decade or so, or more often on curves or in heavy use). If you're trying to keep recurring costs down, a guideway bus may look more cost-effective than a train. On a smaller scale, it may even be more cost-effective.

 

The other side of the equation is energy costs (fuel or electricity). Trains move more bodies with less energy (steel wheels on steel rails are low friction, and building a railroad typically causes you to be careful about grades), assuming you have enough bodies to justify big trains and you fill them efficiently. If the system is going to grow large, rails should be an economic win in the long run. But many cities don't look at the long run, and some planners assume systems won't grow until they're someone else's problem. And some cities (all cities?) have limited funds, and don't want to spend more on transportation than they have to.

 

Poor long-term investment decisions by cities aren't limited to buses and trains. Look at all the conventional road bridges that are close to falling down in the U.S., because they haven't been maintained, and which will now cost millions each to replace/rebuild.

[westfalen]

My wife and I had exactly the same thought while traversing the various bus depots in Brisbane this summer. The Queen Street Mall station is particularly puzzling to us, as was the station across the river by the art museum. Why not, we thought, use light rail? The only answer we could come up with is that Brisbane is perhaps still young and experimenting with transit, and buses are very good for cities that think they will change their mind. But then, the depots suggest permanence…

Until 1969 Brisbane had a very extensive tram system, with the most modern trams in Australia at the time and infrastructure in very good condition with most track laid in concrete and several routes having tracks segregated from the streets. The Mayor at the time decided trams were old fashioned and a traffic hazard (now we have buses that pull out and change lanes in front of you, at least you knew trams would stay on the tracks), and successive city councils of all political persuasions have had a love affair with buses. There were conspiracy theories at the time about political connections to bus builders and suspicions about the burning down of the Paddington tram depot taking a crippling percentage of the fleet with it. Suggestions of light rail surface every few years but never seem to get past the feasibility concept stage.

[Guest ___]

 

BRT Station in Changzhou

 

And one of the busses:

 

The stations are more aerodynamic than the buses that serve it.

[Guest ___]

Poor long-term investment decisions by cities aren't limited to buses and trains. Look at all the conventional road bridges that are close to falling down in the U.S., because they haven't been maintained, and which will now cost millions each to replace/rebuild.

 

Deferred maintenance. NYC was great at this. It was rumored that the Williamsburg Bridge was only being held together by the paint that had not rusted off a decade back.

[lumixraku]

BRTs are definitely alive in places that don't speak english :P I recall riding one in China, Changzhou was the name of the town me thinks....

 

BRT Station in Changzhou

 

And one of the busses:

 

For an extra large version of the (model) bus, click here.

 

But an elevated track just for buses??? interesting concept... i presume its cheaper to build structure for a much lighter bus (cf train) and you dont need to lay/maintain track...

 

 

 

 

In my city, you can find that "train "  style bus. It is NO.715, i am living in Wuhan, China.

[Tenorikuma]

Heh, I live in Nagoya but I've never ridden the Guideway Bus. I think it was a bit of an experiment in alternate mass transit methods. Buses are almost certainly cheaper than train carriages, but in the long run, the efficiency of electric power as well as the speed of trains probably negates that advantage. I'm not sure if it's been a financial success or not.

[Mudkip Orange]

Look at all the conventional road bridges that are close to falling down in the U.S., because they haven't been maintained, and which will now cost millions each to replace/rebuild.

[Mudkip Orange]

My wife and I had exactly the same thought while traversing the various bus depots in Brisbane this summer. The Queen Street Mall station is particularly puzzling to us, as was the station across the river by the art museum. Why not, we thought, use light rail? The only answer we could come up with is that Brisbane is perhaps still young and experimenting with transit, and buses are very good for cities that think they will change their mind. But then, the depots suggest permanence…

 

With a few years of hindsight I think I can give a reason.

 

Here is a line map of the services coming off the south-eastern busway in Brisbane. Note that there are seventeen separate routes which all funnel into the Busway. Everyone who lives on one of these routes gets a single-seat ride into the city.

 

Were it a rail line, there would be at most two separate lines, and everyone would have to change at Eight Mile Plains. Some riders would have to change twice, once at Loganholme or Springwood, then again at Eight Mile. Various studies have shown transit riders perceive time spent waiting to be 2:3 times as long as time spent riding, so eliminating a 5-minute delay at a bus-train change point is worth 10-15 minutes of actual in-vehicle speedup.

 

US transit planners are so focused on selling BRT as "equivalent to rail" that they often end up imitating rail-style end-to-end operations; Los Angeles's Orange Line does this. Pittsburgh is one of the few cities to get it right, but as Pittsburgh's busways were pitched as a direct replacement for existing rail service (rather than a complement to it) they left a bad taste in a lot of peoples' mouths.