They’ve Actually Built China's Elevated Bus (TEB)

An elevated bus that straddles roads, carrying passengers over the traffic below, has been tested for the first time in China.

Well, if I am being honest with you, I never believed that the Transit Elevated Bus would actually get made. Which is why I am super surprised to tell you that The Transit Elevated Bus (TEB) has literally just taken its first test drive in Qinhuangdao, Hebei!

The TEB is powered by electricity and can carry passengers above two lanes of traffic while cars drive underneath it.

The 22 metre long, 7.8 metre wide and 4.8 metre high bus trundled along a 300 metre stretch of road in the city of Qinhuangdao, Hebei province, at an excruciatingly slow speed for its inaugural test run, but the finished version should hit speeds of 40 mph.

The spacious interior of each bus looks more like an luxury airport departure lounge than a public bus and can squeeze in 300 passengers at full capacity. Original designs for the TEB showed multiple carriages linked together to carry up to 1,200 passengers.

Designs for the TEB have come on a long way since they debuted at the 19th China Beijing International High-Tech Expo in May 2016.

Back then, engineers unveiled a toy-sized model of the TEB while promising that full-sized tests would take place in the second half of 2016.

While they certainly got a move on when it came to getting the bus on – or above – the road, tests still have a long way to go before the TEB is put to real use. The bus didn’t navigate any corners on its inaugural test run or deal with any tricky bits of road infrastructure such as crossroads, bridges or traffic lights.

Passengers will board the sixteen-wheeled bus via elevated platforms on the roadside, although commuters in a hurry are still better off taking the subway as no high-speed tests of the bus have taken place yet.

“Its construction can be finished in one year,” said Bai Chiming, the engineer in charge of the TEB project when the bus was unveiled in May. Chinese newspaper The People’s Daily estimates the buses could be in use by the end of this year.

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