Guided busway using rail tracks?

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Yes, the original concept of this was to allow buses to use tram ROWs.

>>1055827

Well now I'm just irritated they didn't do that in the first place. Typical politics in this town

Guided busways are literally the most retarded transit system you could imagine. They require dedicated RoW, are expensive, slow and disruptive to construct & maintain (all that concrete), and at the end of the day you get nothing more than a slow, dirty, noisy & low capacity diesel bus. I can't think of a single advantage that isn't done better or cheaper by trams, light rail or traditional roadways.

>>1055839

They work well here anon, the buses are fast (100kph on the track) and frequent and by being able to get off the tracks and go out into the sprawl they give those areas a fairly good and fast connection to the city. The tracks also run along a narrow and winding river valley which wouldn't permit a road with any speed to be built.

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The two combined tram/O-Bahn systems in Essen and Mannheim were both meter gauge, standard gauge probably wouldn't have worked.

>>1055844
I was wondering about that. What if the bus straddled only one rail instead of both of them?

>>1055842
>diesel bus
>slowly chugging its noisy, dirty, smelly way around "the sprawl"
>fast

kek

A tram or light rail would have been cheaper, faster, and less idiotic.

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>>1055822
I don't know what the 'guided' part buys you. Seattle busses and light rail share transit tunnels. No special guide technology required.

>>1055822
Looks expensive and impractical, but that's just how governments like to have things unfortunately. A tram line looks like it would have been cheaper to build.

>>1055827
I can understand it if it's a rail line with paved concrete on the sides to allow buses to ride it, but infrastructure exclusively for buses like in OPs pic just look retarded.

>>1055839
Same

>>1055849

Speed mostly

>>1055848

,The buses are fast from the city to the interchange and then travel out into the suburbs, with the end result being that they get much faster service than if the bus used roads the entire distance. Also FWIW the buses use LNG

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>>1055854
Forgot picture

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>>1055854
>Speed mostly

Buses are just as fast as the rail. In the tunnels, speed is limited by the short distance between stops. Rail can run faster on the surface, but buses can stop faster for hobos on the tracks (pic related) or cars encroaching on the ROW. So rail can't really run fast other than on the elevated sections.

Nowadays you could probably build a narrow dedicated road rather than a track and have the bus guided by computer instead of by guide wheels to get the same advantage of speed in a narrow and twisting ROW. It would also make incorporating tram tracks easier

>>1055861
There's a bus guided by magnets in the road.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Phileas_(public_transport)

>>1055887

The magnetic guidance system looks interesting, not so sure about the magnetic inductance charging though, seems like that would take away the infrastructure cost advantage over light rail

>>1055822
neat but will never fly in the UK cause its a little to similar to the Pacer

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>>1055979
Nod rly.

>>1056055
The Cambridge guided busway has been a total disaster. It was expensive, late, and largely failed to deliver any of the benefits that were used to justify it. Oh and the chucklefucks built it on top of an existing railway line that could have been used as a light rail RoW or returned to service as part of the East-West Rail Link.

But nah, they had to have buses. Because bus companies gotta bus company.

>>1055822
>better served by a tram
Do the buses go off the rails and onto normal roads at all? If so, no tram could do better.

You mean like Taipei Metro Line 1?

>>1055839
In Xiamen, China's case that was built with upgrade to rail in mind as they can't get approval for such a rail projects and thus they made tons of dedicated RoW roads that can be easily be upgraded to rail once they obtain such approval

>>1056181
Yeh, but a great deal of the passenger traffic is between the interchanges and the city. Its difficult to run enough buses during peak times and they tend to be crowded, trams running along the o-bahn route in combination with buses would improve capacity

>>1056137
You're clearly not from Cambridge.
The railway line was totally useless, it didn't connect anywhere important. The point of using the bus is that once it hits Milton Road it joins the road network and can go into the city.
Train can't do that.... (I mean fucking duh...)

>>1056555
>The railway line was totally useless, it didn't connect anywhere important

Apart from, you know, the whole Varsity Line thing that is being planned for re-opening. Unless "Oxford and onto the Midlands via. the Chiltern Mainline" is not "anywhere important".

>trains can't run on roads
No, because then we call them "Trams". I mean fucking duh...