Wednesday, November 29, 2006

The SkyBus

Here's a picture of the demo SkyBus at the Konkan Railway test site in Goa.

Notice how little space it actually occupies on the ground - a twin track can easily be laid over the middle of every main road in Pune without wasting any of the available carriage width! Elevated stations springing up from the side of the road makes it extremely safe for travellers to get in and out without getting run over by other road traffic (another of the major inconveniences of the BRTS!). And the parallel tracks above ground with the SkyBus suspended underneath make accidents almost a zero-possibility! (Yeah, yeah, I thought about Puneites throwing garbage onto the heads of poor, unsuspecting road-inhabitants below, but these will be air-conditioned coaches...)

Except for the exhorbitant cost of laying the tracks, the solution to India's traffic woes seems almost too good to be true.

And finally - we have seen lots of buses all over the world. Can you imagine how sexy it will be for the city if you have hundreds of these SkyBuses zipping over the Pune landscape? :)

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