The Guideway Bus System At the Asian-Pacific Exposition: Fukuoka 89 891312

The Guideway Bus (GB) system is a kind of guideway transit system using conventional buses fitted with mechanical guidance equipment.

This paper presents a general overview of the GB at the Asian-Pacific Exposition: FUKUOKA '89. This is the first commercial application under license of the Japanese authorities. This system consists of 4 vehicles, 4 stations, a 900 m long double-track guideway with only a single-track section between intermediate stations, a control center, and a maintenance yard. It is capable of carrying 975 pass./h/direction at the minimum headway of 4 minutes. The vehicles are diesel-engine buses, on which the driver operates both brake and accelerator, but does not steer the wheel except for driving in the yard. A vehicle protection subsystem has been developed for avoiding collision or deadlock on the single-track. In order to insure safe passage through the merge and demerge zones at either end of the single- track, an on-board switching subsystem, controlled in tandem with the vehicle protection subsystem, has been also developed