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Wirelessly Charged Buses Being Tested Next Year
An anonymous reader writes "From the article: 'Bombardier's electric transit technology will be tested next winter on buses in Montreal, followed in early 2014 on a route in the German city of Mannheim. The transportation giant's Primove technology is designed to allow buses to be charged by underground induction stations when they stop to let passengers hop on and off.' This technology while impressive may not make it to the U.S. even if proven successful due to the lack of popularity of public transportation. If they could only get my phone to charge wirelessly."
The article says that the induction charging stuff could also be used to charge trains.
If you carried a coil of wire with the correct circuitry attached you'd be able to charge your cell phone at the bus/train stop as well.
For most places, it's because the service is so crappy. And in places like Chicago, they think the solution is to cut services and raise prices. The auto/oil industry also has a lot of say in policy.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
A city's mass transit system is a reflection of its land. blaming transit systems for poor ridership is like blaming a fat man's obesity on his big pants.
I'm from Australia, have lived in Japan, and am now living in the US. I think the US is a great country to live in (especially if you're a software engineer) but one of the things that I find strange is that the downtown areas of cities are so desolate, particularly at night. In every other country I've been to, the "downtown" area is the beating heart of the city - it's the center of business, culture and nightlife. It's a desirable place to be and you have to pay more money to live in or near it.
But in the US, urban environments are for some reason associated with crime, homelessness, the smell of urine and human misery, and so most "normal" (middle-class) people avoid the area. People don't want to live there, let alone be in the area outside of business hours. I find it bizarre that inner city neighborhoods are considered to be bad areas - in Japan and Australia, inner city neighborhoods are the most expensive ones because they're so convenient to live in.
Since most of the normal people (i.e. people who wouldn't urinate in a train) have moved out into the suburbs, American cities are usually left with a decaying urban core and endlessly sprawling suburbs. Public transport requires a certain level of density before it is worthwhile, and most US cities don't meet that level of density. That's the reason why public transport doesn't work here. In the few cities where there is a good level of density (e.g. New York City) there is a good public transport system. But New York is not a typical American city...
Australian cities have sprawling suburbs too, but the urban cores are not full of homeless people and does not smell of urine! The dole bludgers are usually living somewhere in the outer suburbs where land is more affordable.
(reposted after logging in from anonymous coward status) I was in Shanghai in January, and observed supercapacitor (as labeled) buses operating on major routes on-loading and off-loading passengers. Overhead cables lined the route, and at every stop the bus would extend a superstructure to the cables, make contact (whether directly or inductively - unobservable), wait 5-10s, retract, and onward the bus would go. I don't know who manufactured the buses. I simply thought it notable that the Chinese were fielding such a system. I'll leave the questions about liability, etc. to the floor. In any case, and irrespective of where the bus was manufactured, guess who's going to learn whatever shortcomings may lie in this technology and improve on them first for having deployed it. And if the buses were designed or made in China, then . . . props to them. Not trying to create xenophobic bogeymen here, quite the contrary, it's worth observing how different folks operate.