Mourning the demise of the elevated bus

So the "straddling bus" has bitten the dust.

What seemed to be away of revolutionizing public transport and resolving traffic congestion in major urban centers is now no more due to a lack of funding, with the test track in the city of Qinhuangdao, Hebei province, being demolished.

The vehicle, known as the Transit Elevated Bus, had been touted as a whole new means of public transport, able to glide over traffic, and raising commuters above the daily grind of being stuck in traffic jams for hours.

There were legitimate concerns about the feasibility of the project, such as how it could negotiate curves or fit under the many footbridges in cities such as Beijing, as well as worries over how it could turn corners

In addition, there was a certain fog of confusion shrouding the project with regard to its sources of funding.

But in my opinion, this is a lost opportunity. We are already congested to the point of gridlock on the roads in our cities, and we now go under cities such as Beijing with a network of subway lines, so it appears to me that the only other available alternative after going down is to go up.

The Transit Elevated Bus had been greeted with a certain amount of derision ever since the concept was first mooted, with some even saying that motorists may have become alarmed when they approached this unusual vehicle and feared they may crash into it.

Perhaps we need to be a bit more willing to embrace new ideas and not just fall back on the very primitive human emotion of fear of the unknown. After all, this was what greeted a host of innovations throughout history.

Prior to the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester railway line in the United Kingdom, the world's first major rail link, in 1830, there were fears that traveling at the previously unimaginable speed of 27 kilometers per hour, it would be impossible to breathe, or that the passengers' eyes would be damaged by having to adjust to the motion.

And when television was in its infancy in the 1930s in the UK - the first nation to broadcast a regular TV service - there were bizarre fears touted in the media that it would be able to see into viewers' homes, or even that the TV antennas would emit harmful radiation.

Had we listened to these naysayers, where would we be today?

Contact the writer at ian@chinadaily.com.cn