More than 40% of the world’s population live in rural areas and the transformation of lifestyles and urban sprawl is leading to a constant new spread of housing, employment and service areas. The challenge for people living in rural and suburban areas is to have credible alternatives to the private car. For local authorities, mobility is a real lever for a regional dynamic. So how do you move around in sparsely populated areas?
Flexy, the road-rail solution to revitalize local rail services:
DMV ( Dual Mode Vehicle ) road-rail buses operated in West Germany in the early 1950s, and there is currently a road-rail bus running in Japan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn56bMZ9OE8
This reminds me of the inverse where instead of what looks like a bus on rails we had what looked like a tram on the asphalt, RM dismissed them as a Gadget-bahn and many of us here believed if it was a bus that looked like a tram it was just a bus.
However NYC are pursuing it as placing rails into road-ways is expensive in disruption, maintenance, and safety. They believe the painted guideway has merit achieving most of the benefit for little of the cost. CNBC did a video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRF8sz5HC6U How An Autonomous Train-Bus Hybrid Could Transform City Transit – The trackless tram for the price of a bus
The gist is that to the user if the vehicle looks like a tram and feels like a tram they will not care that it is a bus. The feel is that operation is under autonomous control and smooth on segregated rights of way. The major disadvantage appears to be road wear from grooving of the surface, the advantage is that the driver can take over when needed for obstructions and route diversions or extensions.
With current developments in LIDAR the need for paint will become superfluous and the guidance can incorporate fuzzy logic to vary the ridgeline effect.