More importantly, how do you board/descend from that monstrosity?

You won't.

Now that we're jacking up parking fees to pay for the Seawall, every other transit and road dollar in this region will go for the Billionaires' Tunnel.

You can forget about your sidewalks too - Council just made it so nobody will get sidewalks for the next 30 years.

I have to admit, I would rather be behind a bus like this than the one's we have. But with every solution comes new problems.

FAIL, Needs more teeth.

cool, but if there was an accident, it would be a hell of a mess.

@6, China is the most car-mad society on earth. They're already pretty close to owning the largest number of cars of any nation, and buying more at an unprecedented rate, and they are building gazillion-lane expressways and tunnels and bridges and elevated viaducts as fast as they can pour the concrete.

They are also building many massive conventional subway projects in the biggest cities. What I very much doubt they're doing is wasting any money on ridiculous concept vehicles like this one, even if this article suggests there's a pilot project, and they "will get through all of the technical invalidation by the end of August". Uh-huh.

The thing is twenty feet wide. The street in that illustration must be close to 100 feet wide.

Turning that thing must be a bitch.

@9 lol

@9, I assume it goes back and forth on a track. What the point of that is, I dunno.

@11: Well, it would allow for a light rail-esque solution to be created where there is no room for a lane to be taken out of commission for cars. Still, I think we'll get our hovercars first.

Why?

This is going to make things FAR worse for drunk drivers as their peripheral vision is often shot, so you don't see this thing creep up on you. Get startled or scared? Jerk the steering wheel and CRASH into the thing. Yeah I know, your not supposed to be drunk, or design road vehicles that are drunk safe, but I seriously can see alot of drunk drivers crashing into this thing.

@1 picture 7 of the slide show answers your question.

@12, "no room to take a lane out of commission", but it's 20 feet wide? Maybe in Beijing where they can build new boulevards that are 100 feet wide wherever they want, bulldozing neighborhoods with even less regard for the inhabitants than we had in the 1960s.

@16 -- you miss my point. You could install it on an existing roadway without expansion into a neighborhood OR removing an existing car lane.

That said, never gonna happen. But I want my damn hovercar. It's 2010!

@17 But you could that much more simply than some sort of car eating monster looking contraption. A monorail down the median perhaps. And that would at least be able to turn.

They had hovercar plans in Popular Mechanics back in the 90s. What's keeping you, @17?

@18: Would it be nearly as cool?!? I think not. Look, I'm not defending the thing -- I think it's rife with the prospect of death & mayhem. I was just proposing a theory for why it would exist in the form proposed. And, Giffy, I think we all know, no sane society would EVER vote for the funding for a monorail!

Monorail... monorail...

Monorail!
Monorail!!
MONORAIL!!!

mono... D'OH!

I think we, as a species, need to start building things with the assumption that the worst possible outcome will happen. I know that sounds defeatist and unamerican (which is true - I'm Canadian), but I see something like that and can immediately think of too many possible ways that dozens or hundreds of people could die with this thing.

I think if the oil spill teaches us anything, it should teach us to plan assuming Murphy's law to be true. Drunk drivers will turn into the side, the breaks on transport trucks will fail, leaving them to run into it, someone will light the inside on fire and the windows won't open for firefighters to put out the fire...

And what happens if there's an overheight truck that breaks down ahead of this thing? Better hope they can get things towed faster over there than they can here.

You know, if we spent the money we're wasting on this Billionaires Tunnel, including cost overruns, we could have already built the Monorail Green Line by now and have started on the next expansion.

But, hey, bygones. Seattle City Council wants to put us in debt for HALF THE FREIGHT CAPACITY of the existing viaduct with ZERO DOWNTOWN EXITS all so their comrade Developers can get rich selling off the views that will disappear with 4-5 years once the Viaduct is gone ...

Without a Public Vote.

Enjoying the increased parking taxes? Those were just the start ... you'll be paying $10,000 per household in EXTRA taxes - renter or homeowner - AND paying $5 tolls each way - all to help our council's Billionaire and Millionaire friends get rich off of public monies.

'the fuck do we need with that? this is MURRICA. we got plenty a space fer more lanes.