Why are steering wheels on buses positioned more horizontally than vertically?
A friend casually raised this issue the other day over lunch and it stuck with me. I assume it has something to with better handling but I don’t know for sure.
In: Other
Time ago it was to fit the biggest possible wheel, coupled with a reduction ratio, to allow a man to manually steer a very heavy vehicle.
With power steering it is not the case anymore BUT:
The vehicle still weighs a lot and has a lot of momentum, you want to apply little inputs and with precision. On a car, going from straight to full left means less than one turn of the wheel, you can do it easily with a “vertical” wheel, and it’s more comfortable (and safer in a crash). On a bus, to be able to give little inputs, the ratio is different and you have to turn 2-3 full turn to get a full left. In this case, the “horizontal wheel makes more sense, because it allows small movements but it’s also very easy to spin it multiple revolutions when you have to follow narrow turns on the road.
And last, there is a bit of “we always did that way”, in the sense that we started with the big horizontal wheel and even with new tech, it is still viable so why change it?
In fact, it is the car wheel that evolved from horizontal to vertical in the span of a century, while the truck one remained horizontal.
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