Meet the High-Tech Buses of Tomorrow

When French mathematician Blaise Pascal* introduced the world’s first public bus service to Paris in 1662, it was little more than a fleet of seven horse-drawn carriages that ran along three regular routes, carrying six to eight passengers each. (Perhaps too novel for its times, the idea didn’t really catch on until the 1800s.)

Buses have come a long way since Pascal’s horses and buggies. They represent almost half of public transit trips in the U.S., and are increasingly trumpeted as key to multi-modal transport and to urban sustainability. “If you take seriously the climate change challenge and the need to provide more alternatives to the automobile, there are many corridors where the only realistic option is bus,” says Fred Salvucci of MIT’s Transit Lab. Bus lines are cheaper to establish and more flexible than rail-based transit. But the ponderous, diesel-spewing machines don’t tend to get the same love as subways, trains, and streetcars.