On May 17, 2019, the first fully self-driving bus on a short loop route was launched in the Smart Island Special Area (智慧岛) of Zhenzhou City. Despite the fact that this is a special area, it is a full-fledged part of the city with open public transport, residential areas, office buildings, etc.
In June 2020, it was opened to everyone - well, I offer a short overview of all this and a short overview of the merciless war of public and private transport in China.
Actually, there is not much to tell about the bus itself. It is produced by the 宇通 (Yutong) corporation, which is the market leader in vehicles for public transport - in 2018 it 18376 units of buses, and, accordingly, has a market share of 24.4%. It is followed by BYD with 10350 buses.
The bus itself was called 小宇（Baby Yu), it has a maximum speed of 15-20 km / h, accommodates up to 10 people, the power reserve is enough for 120-150 kilometers.
*I apologize in advance for the pictures and videos with watermarks, but I can’t manage to get to all the interesting places in China in order to take a photo myself ^_^
The route looks like this
And of course, the opening of the route for everyone could not go unnoticed by bloggers. I offer a couple of videos about the actual trip
From the point of view of the law, everything is also in the best framework of China's traditions - I have not yet seen such ardent support for new technologies in any country. This includes business licenses, where you can specify your website in the address. These are electronic identity cards, this is also an online court where you can testify without getting up from your chair at home, and attach screenshots of correspondence from Wechat as evidence. Naturally, all this faces problems, but solving problems with the support of the state is much easier than fighting with it.
In order not to be unfounded - I will give an example . The full story is at the link, but in short - here. China Unicom did not accept my foreign passport as a document of the responsible person when registering corporate SIM cards. It took one letter to the Ministry of Industry and Informatization to get an answer that I was in my right and about 3 months for the systems of all three operators to start supporting foreign documents, among other things.
So, returning to the topic - in 2018 in Shanghai were issued for unmanned vehicles - with the prefix 试 (test)
Chinese license plate system
Due to the brevity of the hieroglyphs, two hieroglyphs on the license plate can fully indicate the type of car.
XA 12345 Y
X is always a hieroglyph denoting the province, A is the letter denoting the city of the province, Y is the type of car (or none). That is
粤 B 123456 - personal car, Guangdong province, Shenzhen city
粤 B 123456 警 - police officers, Guangdong province, Shenzhen city (white numbers)
粤 A 123456 学 - training car, Guangdong Province, Guangzhou City (yellow numbers)
粤 F 123456 厂内 - internal transport, Guangdong Province, Foshan City (green numbers)
粤 Z 123456 港 - cross-border numbers, Guangdong province (black numbers)
And so on. Each province has its own, historically formed hieroglyph (Guangdong - 粤， Zhejiang - 浙, Hebei - 冀), and each type of car can also be put into 1 (rarely 2) hieroglyph.学 - training, 海 - Navy, 警 - police, 使 - diplomatic). Plus color differentiation - blue (personal), green (electric cars), yellow (municipal), black (special different types)
Currently, such numbers are issued in 5 regions of China.
1) Shanghai - Didi Chuxing robot taxi rides there, open for public beta test via the official Didi app
2) Guangzhou - Weride robot taxi, open for public beta test
3) Changsha - Dutaxi robot taxi, closed beta test
4) Zhenzhou - robotic buses (which are discussed in the article)
5) Beijing - no mass operator
I myself have only tried Weride GO, but so far it is more of a toy than a real robot taxi:
1) boarding and disembarking only in certain places
2) there is still a driver behind the wheel, even though he did not touch the steering wheel during the entire trip, you still cannot call it a full-fledged unmanned taxi.
In general, the prospects for Chinese unmanned vehicles look very bright.
Why does the article not end there?
Because all this cannot be considered outside the context of the national policy "A car is a luxury." It consists of two parts:
1) draconian, every year tightening requirements for personal vehicles
2) huge investments in public transport
Let's take a look at each facet.
You will be able to buy a car in a car dealership only if you have a certificate of winning the numbered lottery. In Beijing, for example, every 3 months 1 number is drawn for 20 applicants.
Having purchased a car with a license plate of a certain city, you can go to another city only with restrictions. For example, all other cars are allowed to enter the fifth ring of Beijing only from 22-00 to 06-00 or with special permission.
Even with local numbers, a car with a certain number at the end of the number cannot be driven on the roads 1-2 days a week.
Or, in full accordance with the “car is a luxury” policy, you can purchase a number at a special auction. For example, the number 粤V32 was sold for 99999 million rubles
A cross-border number 粤Z can be obtained by donating 30 to 100 million rubles free of charge.
Naturally, such numbers are not subject to the restrictions from the points above.
I know a lot of people are now thinking, “what the heck? And is this a fight? Where interchanges, flyovers, parking lots. I propose to solve a simple problem.
In Moscow, without any restrictions on registration, in 2019 there were 7.1 million vehicles.
In Beijing, which is more or less equal in area to Moscow, there are 6,3 million vehicles.
The question is - if you give out numbers to everyone without restrictions + let everyone into the city without restrictions, how many levels should there be in flyovers so that all this does not stand in traffic jams on an area of 1060 square kilometers (Beijing area inside the fifth ring, the city itself)
Well, it’s clear with restrictions, but what about the development of public transport?
For the 2019 reporting year in China, it was put into operation 803 kilometer metro lines, including in five new cities.
There is simply nothing to compare with. The total length of all US subways built in history is 1320 kilometers - a little more than China was put into operation in a year. The rest are much smaller.
3 out of 6 existing maglev systems in commercial operation are located in China, and in the years. Beijing and Changsha - domestic production.
And finally, as a cherry on the cake, not entirely related to transport, but also significantly contributed to solving the problem of traffic jams
In 2017, all government organizations that do not receive citizens (the Beijing city government, the CPC city committee, the Beijing People's Congress, and a dozen other ministries and departments) moved from the center of Beijing to the Tunzhou area behind the fifth ring. Half of the remaining buildings were used for the reception of citizens, the other half - the question is being decided whether to use them for a museum or other cultural institutions, or simply to increase the area of \u2017b\uXNUMXbgreen spaces in the center. In any case, traffic jams in the center of Beijing disappeared after XNUMX.
Thank you for your attention
Source: habr.com