The plan always seemed a bit too good — or at least too brilliantly weird — to be true. Last year footage and reports about China’s “straddling bus,” a bizarre vehicle that appeared to glide over traffic on roads, went viral and the vehicle was touted as a solution to the country’s traffic congestion problems.
Now the project has been scrapped and 32 people have been arrested for alleged illegal fundraising in connection with it. Suspicions about the project, which resulted in the creation of some intriguing videos, have grown.
Not everyone will have been surprised by the news. Doubts over the legitimacy of the Transit Elevated Bus (TEB) and Huaying Kailai (華贏凱來), the fundraising platform raising investment for it, were raised by Chinese state media in August last year.
Photo: Reuters
Just before that article ran, the company behind the vehicle, TEB Technologies, performed a test run in Hebei Province that created a huge buzz. When I subsequently asked the firm if I could visit them for insights into TEB, I was rebuffed. Chinese firms failing to help foreign journalists is common, but for a company seemingly eager to attract investment the refusal still seemed a little odd.
There had also been doubts that the bus would be able to manage China’s road system, including corners and footbridges, or if it was even strong enough to bear the weight of passengers.
Now the TEB prototype lies in a rusting state and investors sweat over getting their money back: another example of futuristic transport that makes great headlines, but does not offer a solution to China’s serious traffic problems.
According to Statista, China’s vehicle population last year was 194 million — up from 105 million five years previously. Between 1982 and 2015, China’s urban population shot up from 21 percent to 56 percent and the government’s target for 2020 is 60 percent. The fast growing city population combined with rise of car ownership has led to enormous traffic problems in many cities.
In Beijing, which has about 5.6 million cars, tough driving restrictions have been introduced in an attempt to cut both traffic and air pollution. It is one of many cities in China to cap the amount of number plates issued annually, implementing a monthly “license plate lottery.” Applicants face extremely long odds of being granted plates, forcing many to stay off the road for years.
The ambition for Beijing transport authorities is to keep the number of cars in the city below 6.3 million by 2020.
While the road-straddling bus has proved a failure, other businesses such as bike-sharing companies like Ofo could have more success.
Ofo Inc (共享單車) has made 40,000 to 50,000 of its bikes available to hire in Beijing with a GPS system tracking their location and use. They can be unlocked by users using a combination code sent through the company’s app. These and other bike-sharing startups have attracted major investors, including tech giants Didi Chuxing (滴滴出行) and Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊).
Last year, former Chinese Academy of Engineering executive vice president Pan Yunhe (潘雲鶴) predicted a future in which bike-share schemes evolved to offer electric mini-cars. Such cars would “probably be a major transportation vehicle in Chinese cities in the future,” he wrote.
While bike-sharing schemes are having a positive impact, policy changes are the key to tackling congestion in Chinese cities, World Resources Institute China Cities Programme director Liu Daizong (劉岱宗) said.
Liu said transport authorities in cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing and Shenzhen are considering introducing congestion charge zones, having seen them successfully reduce traffic in London, Singapore and Stockholm.
Measures such as these were vital to encourage drivers to use public transport instead of their cars, he said.
“In China we are focused on technology, but people do not use public transport because of the technology. They use it because of high-quality service and speed,” he said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained