Altcar 2008: Big Blue Buses of the future unveiled
Three new and radical bus concepts were unveiled in Santa Monica this morning as part of the third annual AltCar Expo. The bus of the future contest is an exercise in what's possible down the road, but it's also very timely: public transportation ridership in Santa Monica is up seven percent compared to last year.
The judges were looking at a lot of different aspects of making a better bus. As one brochure describing the contest explained, "tomorrow's buses need to be sleeker, sexier, environmentally-friendly, customized for maximum comfort and responsive to all the different ways people want to use transit." No small task.
Three students from the Art Center College of Design were selected to have their big bus dreams as finalists in the competition. These are fanciful concepts, not product specifications for tomorrow's factory output. The contest focuses not just on sustainability, but also on what riders in 20 or 30 years will require from their buses.
First up, from Gabriel Wartofsky, is the Icon Bus. Wartofsky said he wanted to translate the well-known London double-decker design into something a little more California, so his sleek concept provides a lot of window space to check out the beach or the mountain views here in Santa Monica. As for the green angle, the Icon Bus is designed to be a Positive Emissions Vehicle, which means that there are TiOx gills to eat ozone in the oxygen and it is built using part made from sequestered CO2. Crazy, but why not? The Icon Bus won the Sustainability Award from the judges.
My favorite of the bunch is Giuseppe Fillippone's Cougar Bus, which is designed around a cat-like skeleton from which passenger pods of various sizes hang. During busy times, big pods carry more passengers and during the middle of the day, smaller pods mean less mass moving down the street and so less fuel burned. The Cougar Bus was awarded the Innovation Award.
Lastly, there's Mike Peterson's Clear Volume Bus, which shares the Icon's love of making the outside visible to passengers. Also, the middle section of the bus drops down to curb height to ease the mad dash on and off the bus at each stop. The Clear Volume Bus won two awards, for Branding and Ride-Ability. We should be getting high-res images of these concepts later. For now, though, enjoy these pictures taken at the Big Blue Bus booth.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
jeffzekas 8:23PM (9/26/2008)
Building a "better bus" is like putting lipstick on a pig: pretty, but still a pig!!!
Have any of these folks ever RIDDEN the buses in Los Angeles or Santa
Monica? I mean, maybe buses have changed, since I moved away in
1972... I remember the following types of people riding Santa
Monica's Big Blue Buses: dirty, smelly derelicts sleeping in the
back, crazy old women mumbling to themselves, gangbangers and
druggies, retarded adults, illegal aliens, and all the losers who
couldn't afford cars... so, why "throw good money after bad"? Build a
light rail, or an underground like the London Tube... and have POLICE
all over the place, and keep it CLEAN, and arrest homeless crazy
derelicts and gangsters and other dangerous, loitering jerks...
THEN-- and only then-- will normal, middle-class folks ride "public
transportation"... forget "better" buses, because the buses are
SCARY!!!
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rgseidl 9:57AM (9/27/2008)
If looks were the only thing that mattered, the TU Delft superbus would win hands down. Unfortunately, running a bus service at top speeds of 150mph on dedicated, super-smooth freeway lanes is not realistic, especially in SoCal.
@ jeffzekas -
fancier buses aren't going to cure the social ills of California and to some extent, bus ridership is a microcosm of those. However, your shrill reaction also belies an ugly truth: the "normal", middle-class and - not to put too fine a point on it - typically white folks you refer to tend to assume everyone who doesn't look like them is a criminal about to mug them. It's a measure of how the private motor car has allowed the social fabric to unravel.
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