Abstract
Urban diseases characterized by traffic jams, too more time commuted on the way, etc. are widely regarded as to be caused by the shortcomings of existing transportation technology. It cannot be cured completely by using the existing transportation technology. However, advanced automatic driving technique and vehicle-road cooperative technique turned likey to be a curer. Here emgerged a new concept called Changing Buses by the Way of Car Following (Express Vehicle for short), which allows passengers to make transfer between the running leader vehicle and follower vehicle, and both vehilces feature automatic driving, automatically connecting and disconnecting while running. An express vehicle fleet composed of several express vehicles keeps running (no stop) on the ring road. When drawing bus stop, one more vehicle leaves bus stop and joins the fleet from ahead. At the rear of the fleet, one vehcle separtes from fleet and come to stop at bus stop after deceleration. Special ring road should be built for automatically driving express vehicle to reach integration of vehicle and road. In the situation when the express vehicle fleet running at the speed of 60km/h on the elevated ring road with a length of 60km and distance of 600m between bus stops, it will take passenger about 30 minutes for runing half of the whole length. In case of driving 10 express vehicles connected together with a fleet length of 50m, taking 200 passengers and a departure interval of 30s, the traffic capacity of elevated ring road in single direction may reach 24000 personsX60km/h. As data shown, express vehicle may, in practice, run more effectively than that of subway (Refer to main text Table 3 and Table 5). Therefore, it is suggested to introduce it for playing an active role in old city reconstruction and urban expansion.
