Imagine hovering over city streets at 40 miles per hour, zooming past congested traffic and sidewalks filled with pedestrians. That’s how engineering company, Transit Explore Bus, wants to transport people with its Land Airbus—an electric elevated bus that straddles roads on specially made tracks.
The company unveiled a cute mini model of the Land Airbus at the recent International High-Tech Expo in Beijing. In the video, you can see cars enter the mouth of the bus’s cavernous temporary tunnel, and safely come out the other end. The proposed vehicle can span two roads and is elevated so cars taller than two meters (six-foot-seven) high can drive underneath, China Xinhua News reports in the video.
Om nom nom.
“The bus will save lots of road space,” Song Youzhou, chief engineer of the Land Airbus project, says in the video. “It has the same function as the subway, but costs only 16 percent of what subway costs. Manufacturing and construction are also much shorter than for the subway.”
China Xinhua News also reports that the Land Airbus could replace 40 conventional buses, reduce 800 tons of fuel, and 2,480 tons of carbon emissions annually. In addition to being a greener mode of transportation, the Land Airbus has the capability of drastically changing the way city transit is organized. Since the special rails will be integrated on existing roads and highways, the company is less likely to run into issues with land acquisition and environmental regulations, according to TreeHugger.