Beijing's Controversial 'Trans Elevated Bus' Project Is Being Shut Down

By Justine Lopez, June 22, 2017

We called it when we first heard about it: There's no way that Beijing’s “straddling bus” is ever going to be a real thing. It turns out we were right. After a year of listening to the hype and reading about trial runs the project has officially been shut down.

The 16-foot-tall bus was designed to carry up to 1,400 passengers. Because it would hover over other vehicles it would supposedly help ease traffic in Chinese cities like Beijing. The super futuristic looking bus received all sorts of attention from local and international media after the project was unveiled last year.

However, it looks like we can all move on from the idea of a Transit Elevated Bus (TEB) because the project has reached its final stop. Workers are now tearing down the test site for the TEB, which is located in Hebei. It should be fully demolished by the end of the month, South China Morning Post reports.

The news doesn’t really come as a surprise. We were clearly highly skeptical about the whole project when we first heard about the TEB after a scale model of the enormous bus was unveiled at the 19th China Beijing International High-Tech Expo in May 2015. We were actually shocked when we found out the TEB-1, a single-car model of the bus, was built and taken for multiple test runs from August to October of last year.

It seemed, against all odds, that the company was going forward with this harebrained project. But then a few days after the test drive, the TEB became embroiled in all sorts of controversy. We found out that the “test drive” was actually a private event held by a company, not the city. It was also revealed that the project was run by Huaying Kailai, an online crowd-lending platform. However, Huaying Kailai is now suspected of illegally obtaining funds from the public.

It was only a matter of time before the project was shut down.

According to one employee who works on the test site, the developer and the local government failed to reach a contract renewal deal. Their current contract is rumored to end in July.

But contracts aside, was an enormous straddling bus really ever feasible?

We still have so many questions: What happens when cars change lanes? What happens when vehicles are carrying a load more than seven feet high? What happens when drivers panic when they see an enormous bus speeding toward them?

There are just so many thing wrong with this idea.