For anyone who’s been stuck in a traffic jam wishing they could just sail right over everyone in their way, we proudly present this: The Straddling Bus. It seems like just a few months ago we were looking at nothing more than computer-rendered concept videos and miniature models of this crazy thing – and that’s because it was just mere months ago.
We originally reported on this mass transit masterpiece in May of this year, and it’s already an actual thing. Those folks in China are not messing around. And who can blame them? Traffic in the world’s largest cities is growing at an untenable level, and this 1400-passenger bus, which looks like a moving tunnel, really, is a pretty clever solution.
The straddling bus isn’t fully deployed yet – this test was limited to 300 meters of carefully controlled test track — but still, it would seem China is dead serious about getting it on its city streets as soon as possible.
Scoot it!
Car and bike sharing have become pretty popular in many major cities around the world, but we’ve just learned Berlin is the first to test scooter sharing.
A Taiwanese company called Gogoro is launching the program in four Berlin neighborhoods with 200 scooters to start. And they’re electric scooters, no less. Digital Trends ran into Gogoro at CES in 2015 where we were first introduced to the company’s battery-swapping idea, which allows users to swap out dead batteries for fresh ones.
Gogoro launched the battery swapping program in Taipei last year, started selling the scooters for $4100 each, and has since sold 10,000 bikes, according to PC magazine.
The scooters can apparently reach a max speed of 60 MPH, and they’ve got some decent get-up-and-go, reaching 30 MPH from 0 in just over 4 seconds.
The program in Berlin just a tester, but if the service takes off, we’ll likely see it spread across Europe and, hopefully, across the Atlantic to the US.
More Marshawn Mantics
Finally, today. What happens when you put Marshawn in the gym with three fitness watches? He calls his cousin, Marcus Peters. Marshawn was never one to workout conventionally, plus the man is retired! Let the kids handle this one, right?
We strapped up Marcus, who was Defensive Rookie of the year last season as cornerback for the Kansas City Chiefs, and we found out just how well these fitness trackers tracked the fitness of a hard-core pro athlete. We think you’ll be interested by what we learned, so check out that story here.
