Saturday, June 3, 2017

People's Daily — World's 1st driverless rail transit system unveiled in Hunan

Chinese railcar-maker CRRC on Jun. 2 unveiled a new product called Autonomous Rail Transit (ART) in Zhuzhou, Hunan province, and the bus-rail combo rapid transit system is expected to speed up city's public transportation.
According to CRRC, ART uses rubber wheels on a plastic core instead of steel wheels. It's also equipped with the company's copyrighted technology to automatically guide the vehicles. It carries the advantages of both rail and bus transit systems and is agile and non-polluting, Thepaper.cn reported.
ART is much cheaper than ordinary subway, which cost about 400-700 million RMB per kilometer in China. And compared with electric streetcars, which cost 150-200 million RMB per Kilometer, ART is only about one-fifth the investment. 
CRRC began designing the ART system in 2013. The first ART car is 31 meters in length, with a maximum passenger load of 307 people or 48 tons. Its top speed is 70 kilometers per hour, and it can travel 25 kilometers in distance after 10 minutes of charging.
The world's first ART line will be launched in Zhuzhou, with a total length of 6.5 kilometers. Upon completion, it will be able to dock with the city's mid-low speed maglev train.
President Xi said to innovate.

China.org.cn

9 comments:

John said...

The US should have been there and done it decades ago, and connected the whole country with a gigantic network of 300km driverless trains. But the US being as dysfunctional as it is, technological progress, especially that directed towards social needs, is being held up. If the US didn't have such wacky political parties, it'd be a century ahead of everyone else. Forget the American 21st century, we'd be talking about American centuries to come. The ideological idiocy is now harming US productivity and progress. Unbelievable madness.

Peter Pan said...

In Canada, railroads have been abandoned and removed. We're too spread out over vast areas to make passenger rail economic. Even bus service is barely sustainable.

I see cars and bicycles in our future.

John said...

Bob, but there is no economic reason to not connect major cities that are relatively close. In fact, there is every economic reason to do so, say between Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto. Fair enough, it would be impossible to do coast to coast, especially the areas that are scantily populated. But the US Northeast could easily be connected, for example. I suppose the most densely populated areas in California could and should be connected with highspeed rail. Similarly other places. No one, I don't think, is advocating New York to Los Angeles.

Peter Pan said...

The Windsor to Quebec City corridor may someday be connected by high speed rail. The main obstacles are the number of level crossings and munnie.

The Maritimes are connected by the Trans-Canada highway. That won't change in my lifetime.

Kaivey said...

London's Dockland Light Railway has been driverless since 1987.

Noah Way said...

In the early 1900's Henry Ford bought up streetcar companies and closed them.

Peter Pan said...

According to the article, these vehicles are bus/train hybrids. They can run on roads or on rails.

Matt Franko said...

the libertarians all think we are out of munnie... none of this is going to get done until we throw the libertarians out...

Kaivey said...

Sounds awesome!