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Recently Cyrus showed on her blog some pictures of a bus used in the 1980s in Guangzhou, China.
These pictures were taken in a museum. And only in a museum can this kind of bus be seen in Guangzhou now. Maybe in Beijing it's still on the road.
I still remember when I was about 5 years old, mom taught me Mandarin in this kind of bus everyday, when we were taking the bus home.
Cantonese is my native language. Cantonese people don't speak Mandarin much. And when we speak Mandarin, our Cantonese accents are thick. My Mandarin was as poor as other Cantonese people's before I went to USTC. However, after I lived in USTC -- a Mandarin speaking place -- for 4 years, my Mandarin is even better than my Cantonese. Now even in the USA, I still speak Mandarin the most. English is the second most spoken language, while Cantonese is the last one. Each time I see zyx, I have to spend quite a bit of time to get used to the Cantonese conversation with him. I hope as I get used to the life in USA, I can speak English more; and 4 years later, my English can be half as good as my Cantonese.
Anyway, those old buses are too long to run in modern cities. Shorter buses replaced them. Soon, as fossil fuels (gasoline/diesel oil) gets more and more expensive and global warming becomes more and more serious, traditional fossil-fuel-burning buses are going to be replaced by new environment-friendly buses which are driven by clean energy.
Recently UC Irvine started to run a 100% biodiesel bus (B100). They claimed that B100 will help UC Irvine becoming a carbon neutral campus from a transportation perspective. Carbon neutrality is based on how biodiesel fuel is manufactured. The biodiesel that the campus uses is made from soybeans, which pulls carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the air; burning the fuel puts it back into the air, thus the effect is neutral. Whereas with fossil fuels, there are no plants to pull the CO2 out of the air, so burning those fuels raises CO2 levels, which in turn leads to global warming.
