China Plans Enormous Car-Straddling Bus

The Chinese government has come up with a spectacular solution to Beijing's congestion problems: a giant bus that straddles the road, allowing cars to drive under it. The bus is designed to be 20 feet wide, 14 feet tall, and carry between 1,200 and 1,400 passengers. While the bus could allay traffic problems, the project engineers themselves have pointed out that turns could become a dangerous proposition while cars are driving under the bus.

"Inside the bus, there are turning lights that indicate a the bus is intending to make a turn to warn the cars inside," the presenter says at one point. But such a signal system combined with human traffic behavior sounds like "a recipe for trouble," Robert Quigley notes at Geekosystem. (More China stories.)