I like this; it's smart. It's a low tech solution that simply coordinates transit based on demand and self optimizes to serve that demand.
The value of buses and trains running on schedule is mainly that you can plan around it. But what if transit worked like Uber. Some vehicle shows up to pick you up. It might drop you off somewhere to switch vehicles and some other vehicle shows up to do that. All the way to your destination (as opposed to a mile away from there). As long as the journey time is predictable and reasonable, people would be pretty happy with that.
This is really brilliant — like desire paths, but for transit. Obviously execution will be challenging, but the concept is fantastic, and China/Shanghai seems like one of the few places with the requisite density & state capacity to actually make this work.
Generally I think that the design of public spaces has SO MUCH room to be improved by just responding to the wisdom of the crowd.
If your transit operator is competent it is doing studies that look at more than just the people motivated to go through effort. They need to look for people who would use a route if it existed, but can't be bothered to open an app to ask for it - this is likely a much larger group than those who ask for something.
Well, certainly, a transit operator should be doing their own research — this isn’t a replacement for that.
But this is excellent as a complementary new piece of data, especially one that can be gathered so frequently and easily (especially compared to lengthy transit studies)
Either transit studies should not be so lengthy and there are plenty of know ways to gather data that are less biases; or there is good reason for the length. Note that the above is not an exclusive or - there is a time and place for short studies and a time for long studies. However either way the study needs to be carefully designed to not get biased data, and this app is biased data.
In a lot of places, even pilot programs get stuck in analysis paralysis. Public space design could benefit so much from this kind of feedback loop - more listening, less assuming.
A few years back, Citymapper launched a bus line in london where the route was defined based on the amount of data they had about desired paths from their users that were badly covered by the existing network. https://citymapper.com/news/1800/introducing-the-citymapper-...
I didn't follow closely but it looks like the project got canceled, as https://citymapper.com/smartbus returns a 404.
It sounds great, but if this idea is a result of cost-cutting then it might not be so great in reality.
The masses are the real heroes, while we ourselves are often childish and ignorant, and without this understanding, it is impossible to acquire even the most rudimentary knowledge.
-- Mao Zedong
Here in South Africa, we have "Taxis", which are individually owned (to a degree) minibuses crammed full of people. Routes are whatever maximises earning potential for the driver, so it is a kind of bottom up solution in a sense.
It is a violent cartel, so certainly not a good thing across the board, but it's just an interesting variant.
In most countries in South America there is a similar system of buses called combis (or micros). The buses are private and the routes change at the whim of the driver/owner based on demand, etc. Usually main stops are posted in the front window of the bus (it's messy looking lol)
China is the only modern country that has both the capability and the lack of bureaucracy to just do things like this. It's simultaneously amazing to see and a depressing reminder of how badly western societies are crippled by rules of their own making. It would take years to make a single new bus route in any city, I don't think I've ever even seen that happen.
Check out Warsaw, Poland. Public transit is excellent, clean, and basically gets you anywhere via bus, tram, subway, or one of 4+ ridesharing apps. Bike lane coverage is also pretty good. It's obviously an order of magnitude smaller than Shanghai, but so are most Western cities.
Good overview of the system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Kn2tL51bBs&t=8s
Warsaw really is booming, visiting from Berlin feels like stepping ten years into the future.
Lots of real (and not paper) economic growth.
Hah, yeah I do really like Berlin, but traveling from Warsaw to Berlin does feel like going back in time, infrastructure and mentality wise.
ObWikipedia: pączi are a Polish filled doughnut [1] that seems awesome. Thanks.
How does taking transit versus car compare for travel times?
Even in Lisbon, it seemed that public transit was a much bigger hassle, both in time and cost, than a ride-sharing app.
We had a family of 4. Fares are about €3-4 each so €12 per ride in one direction. Ride-shares were about €9. We also abused the intro ride-share offers by creating separate accounts and got that down to €4.50.
4 people, for a short term stay is about where it starts to make sense to ride share. Long term, you would have an longer term pass, vastly reducing the cost of a busride, and you would often travel in smaller groups. So in my experience there are times when bus/tram can be much faster and convenient than a car. Of course there are many cases where it is the other way round (and going out of the cities that ratio changes dramatically for a car). Good city design tends to favor a ratio in favor of public transport over cars.
Generally I think the subway is much faster if you’re going more than 2-3km, and the tram is slightly faster than cars because you have a designated lane. Tickets are time-based, not trip-based. A 20 minute ticket is about 94 euro cents and an unlimited day pass is maybe 4 euros?
I only use ride sharing for longer 30+ minute trips, and usually that is between 10 and 15 euros one direction.
> It would take years to make a single new bus route in any city, I don't think I've ever even seen that happen.
It happens all the time in Western Europe, not sure what you’re talking about
Might be USian bias. I've seen bus routes change in the US but not to the degree of adding massive amounts of service.
Adding massive amounts of service costs a lot of money. It is always a bad thing if you see that anywhere in the world. It takes years for people to adjust their lives around better service, so your experiment will have data proving it was a wasted investment long before it works. If your city happens to do a massive investment despite my strong recommendation against it look close at the funding - if they don't have committed funding to continue that service for 10 years just ignore it as odds are too high they will cancel that service just as your start to rely on it and then you have to scramble to adjust your life (generally meaning buy a car - if you are car dependent you budget for the costs of a car, but if you normally use transit this is a sudden large expense that you probably can't handle).
Adding more service is a good thing, but it needs to be done in a sustainable way so that people can rely on it long term.
Sometimes cities will make massive changes to their network. By eliminating bad routes they can often find the money to fund good routes. This is a very different situation.
Dublin is the exception that proves the rule. They somehow managed to convince everyone that they were going to run their system for 10 years and thus it could be trusted, and then continued running it long enough to get people to start using it.
Great if you can pull that off in your city, but I'm not confident you can. For that matter if you can pull it off it means you are lacking smaller investments many years before that would have resulted in some transport that you could have grown over time to what you are finally getting.
I'm guessing bluGill is referring to long term changes like selling a car, selecting housing, or selecting a job.
> It would take years to make a single new bus route in any city, I don't think I've ever even seen that happen.
I live in a city in a Western European country which adds multiple new bus routes a year, and always has done. Honestly I'd assume this is the case for any medium to large city.
The unusual bit about the Shanghai initiative is that, presumably, they have significant _spare_ capacity, to be used for low-volume/experimental stuff like this. Spare capacity is a slightly weird thing for a bus network to have; they tend to run basically on the edge.
> It's simultaneously amazing to see and a depressing reminder of how badly western societies are crippled by rules of their own making.
It all comes down to corruption. In the west we are accustomed to thinking we are much less corrupt, but that is proving not to be less and less true every day.
Corruption is loyalty to a man over a mission. All systems that have good outcomes are when the man that people are loyal to (because he can punish dissent and reward loyalty, such as with wages) chooses a mission over their own self interest and enforce subordination to a mission over themselves.
China is a country that is capable of punishing their richest citizens, while the US and most of the west are not. China executed the executives that poisoned infant formula. Here in the US, our "law" let the Sackler Family promote addiction and then gave them a slap on the wrist while letting them use the "law" to reduce/avoid consequences.
China has more Rule of Law than the US right now.
Rule of law was thought to be a system where all citizens, including the rich, are protected from the government by due process, but rule of law is when the rich and powerful have limits on their arbitrary executions of power. Law exists to protect the weak from the powerful, law exists to bind power. In the west the rich have co-opted law as their tool.
> crippled by rules of their own making.
No, not our own making. The making of our richest. The rules in the west exist to solidify and cement the power of our richest and they use their money to pay for power consolidation giving them increasingly more power to compromise our laws for their interest.
China can do things because their power is working on behalf of their people, while in the west our power is working on behalf of the powerful.
> lack of bureaucracy
Who do you think is doing these things? Literally their bureaucracy. It requires people to organize and do those things. Bridges and tunnels don't get built without planning, funding, and execution, which is exactly what bureaucracies do.
The rich people in the west have been so effective at compromising institutions of power that "bureaucracy" is synonymous with "inefficiency." Their bureaucrats are trusted with the power to make things happen, while our elected officials bind their behavior and set them up for failure in order to justify privatizing their functions.
> China has more Rule of Law than the US right now.
Not quite. You either don't realize or are overlooking how much implementation of the law in China, at every level, depends very much on who is doing the implementation. But the US under Trump is quickly heading down the road to where I can see it being worse than China in that respect.
> China can do things because their power is working on behalf of their people, while in the west our power is working on behalf of the powerful.
I can't disagree with your criticism of the West, but your statement about China is straight from a CCP propaganda handbook.
> China executed the executives that poisoned infant formula.
That was a long time ago, and obviously those executives didn't have the necessary guanxi.
Who gets accused and is found guilty of corruption in China depends very much on who is in power. That much was obvious in how Xi cleared out the opposition from 2013-2017. Bo Xilai is a prime example.
But back to the original topic of public transportation: That's one thing China gets right that the US is totally inept at because it's built on a car culture.
> but your statement about China is straight from a CCP propaganda handbook.
and? the Chinese people live and believe it. propaganda can be true, and governments can in fact live up to their statements. ofc with westerners' pathological mistrust of authority, as well as their penchant to pick the worst possible leaders, we will never come to any agreement about this.
also, are we seriously still unironically typing "guanxi" in this day and age? social capital is hardly something to be exoticized. keep the orientalist rhetoric where it belongs please.
I've heard the explanation of "planned corruption" from two different upper class Chinese people.
The idea being that there is a gunaxi correlated "budget for corruption," but use of that budget comes with strings, and if corruption is engaged in, you are effectively signing a contract for results and that results forgives the corruption.
The mandarin first speaker who first said the idea didn't explain it exactly like that, but believed it completely and without question. The Cantonese first speaker who explained it more rigorously believed it in practice, but also that the corruption budget was far exceeding what was "planned" for creating crisis. Both asserted their own superiority to India, which also has a culture of corruption without a culture that demands results. Neither of them knew eachother.
Certainly when I heard that, my American ideological immune system was like "uh hu, that's certainly an interesting perspective." I was reminded of stories about how stringent military quartermasters are because it's understood that corruption is viral.
But it's hard to argue that China does not have results, long term thinking (kinda), and it appears to act on behalf of the public more.
Around the time of Hong Kong, I was fully on board with "Kantian universalize-able ideals restricting the actions of societies most rich and powerful" being a good definition for Rule of law, but since Trump round 2 in particular, I've come to analyze rule of law not by what it is, but what its outputs are supposed to be with the underlying assumption that any system that produces results must in some ways have structure that reflect Rule of Law.
Rule of law is when people, particularly leaders, subordinate to an idea/reality/reason rather than to a hierarchical structure/arbitrariness, so even if there is corruption consequences for failure and reward for success is rule of law-ish. I think that's even more visible when compared to the western standard of reward for failure and reward for success, more commonly stated as "rugged capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich" or "privatize profits and socialize risks."
> how much implementation of the law in China, at every level, depends very much on who is doing the implementation.
Is that is not true here? What you stated is true of all hierarchical systems. The criminalization of "driving while black" in practice is an example of who is doing the implementation effecting law in America, and that is just one example out of many. The current head of the OMB said he wants to put government workers in trauma so that they do not have the resources to regulate big oil, on video.
> worse than China in that respect.
We are already there.
> but your statement about China is straight from a CCP propaganda handbook.
It is my external assessment from my own observations including significant amounts of talking with Chinese citizens. If you think I am a CPC propagandist, you can check my comment history where I assert that Taiwan is its own country many many times, and I am quite critical of many things, but if you want to have reality based assessments, it's clear that China can build things while the west generally cannot and it's clear China was right about the GFW (which implies a whole bunch of things Americans generally aren't ready to confront), even if what is said about the GFW is almost word for word the same out of Chinese people's mouths and very clearly propaganda.
> That was a long time ago, and obviously those executives didn't have the necessary guanxi.
I can't argue with that assessment, but it is also tautologically true based on how you define gunaxi. Regardless, there were consequences, while there are a dearth of any consequences for anything of our rich class in the US. We even refer to this immunity to prosecution as "the corporate veil," which appears to be nearly impenetrable in the US. The only time it seems to be penetrable is when another person of the same class is damaged.
> Who gets accused and is found guilty of corruption in China depends very much on who is in power
My core point is that we can't seem to find anyone guilty here. There are no consequences for the rich in the west. In the US the law is used as a weapon to create order while maintaining power hierarchies and not a system of using the states power against the powerful to promote justice. When Hong Kong was re-colonized by the Chinese, it was rule Rule of Law and the rights associated with it that became the academic argument for why those in Hong Kong are justified to protest extradition, and while at the time I found those arguments quite compelling. The degradation of the west and clear decline of democracy has turned the issue from what was clearly black and white at the time, to something that is much more grey.
If I ask which country has more corruption, I don't think the answer is very clear anymore, and if law is supposed to address corruption particularly at the highest levels, then it seems clear our notion of law is weak.
You mention CPC propaganda, but what about our own propaganda? If you analyze while assuming our own propaganda is true, western ideas make a lot of sense, but if you analyze ground reality, reality seems to be conflicting strongly with our propaganda.
> Who gets accused and is found guilty of corruption in China depends very much on who is in power. That much was obvious in how Xi cleared out the opposition from 2013-2017.
And yet my understanding is most Chinese (greatly influenced by the perceptions of those I interact with) believe that there was a successful crackdown on rampant corruption coinciding with a cross society economic uplifting. China is now a technological power house, and their innovation engine is now very much competitive, if not exceeding, our own.
What if those people cleared out actually were corrupt? What if they were like republicans who argue that the government can't work, and that's why they should be in power/their crony friends should get all the contracts? What if those people are doing as much damage to society as possible in order to justify new leadership? That's what's happening in the US and has been happening for 50 years.
So what looks like a black and white power grab, once you put those ideas in American terms, is much much less black and white.
> That's one thing China gets right that the US is totally inept at because it's built on a car culture.
These topics are related. Car culture is a function of the car industry's capture of the US government. China, AFAIK, wants to imitate car culture in order to not appear poor, but whether car company concerns or national concerns come first and how that gets navigated is materially meaningful to public transportation. Public transportation means less car owners, less car infrastructure, etc. It is unchecked power in the US that prevents our own infrastructure investments, because making those investments means challenging those who currently enjoy nearly unchecked power.
> depended entirely on whose side they were own
I don't believe in 'side-ism'. A crackdown on the GOP would be a benefit for the rule of law while it still being in a perilous position, while a crackdown on the DNC is very a much a prelude to destroy the idea of rule of law altogether.
Destroying the opposition isn't obviously bad. Referencing side-ism implies that removing all the nazis from your government is a bad thing because it gives non-nazis unchecked anti-nazi political power. I view that as a good thing if the definition of nazi reflects reality (like in germany) rather than unreality (like russia/urkaine).
My experience/impression is social and as an outsider, so your information/experience is probably much better than mine, although mine is a bit later than yours, but also not current.
> I know, I lived it for a number of years, owned a business there, was deeply immersed in the goings on, and many frank discussions with our circle of well educated Chinese (many of whom were emigrating or at least getting their kids out of the country).
How predictable/arbitrary would you say the operating environment was?
Predictability suggests rule of law, while arbitrariness strongly suggests none. I'm not sure I would buy IP related examples as related to rule of law, and I would also likely try to distinguish between a hyper competitive environment between unequally resourced people and arbitrary executions of power, which I don't quite think are the same.
> faustian bargain
Timothy Snyder is my favorite political thinker, he recently wrote "On Freedom" and talks about "freedom from" vs "freedom to" at length. Money in many ways is freedom. If you don't have money you are not very free. So China getting richer, while in America Wages are stagnant and losing buying power year over year has implications for overall freedom. In many ways China is becoming more free and America less free if you think about "freedom to" and "freedom from" holistically rather than just "freedom from" which is a very American way of thinking about freedom. Chinese policy becomes a lot more defensible in terms of "freedom to" while it is completely indefensible in terms of "freedom from."
Where once I saw authoritarianism in China, now I ask how much of their behavior is actually an answer to the Paradox of Intolerance and how true the argument of the greater needs for ensuring order in a society at that scale (which from what I can tell is definitely propaganda used to sell it internally). Don't get me wrong, I completely see china as an authoritarian state rife with unchecked (and therefore arbitrary) power, but China is also functional in a way the US is very much not and that's become very interesting to think about, for me.
I'm interested in your analysis of China from a "freedom to" perspective.
> no opportunity to mount any resistance, and therefore "mei banfa"
Timothy Snyder calls this "the politics of eternity."
> middle class will support the government
Given what you've said so far, what does it mean for the middle class to not support the government? Consent is the core primitive of western political ideology and foundational idea of 'rule of law,' so the implication of withdrawing consent is certainly interesting.
Last time I lived in a city was a while back, but at that time Denver updated routes a few times a year. I'm not saying they are the speediest, but I don't know how you are claiming that no new route can be created in any Western city without years of work. That simply is not true.
Or, if you want to go small, my school district changed bus routes with a 48 hour turn around time when we moved to our home in the country, and again when our teenager's schedule changed and he could no longer drive the younger sibling home.
Routes should not be created or changed often. People need to rely on transit, if they can't be sure their route will still be there for long they should buy/drive a car even if there is good transit today since they will need that car when the routes change to something that doesn't work.
changing routes is needed of course. Cities chanre and you need to follow that. They don't change fast though. long term routes also drive change as people adqust their life to what they can do.
I went down a rabbit hole a couple years back, and it blew my mind to learn that many modern bus routes just replicate streetcar service that was discontinued (and the tracks torn up) 70-80 years ago.
That isn't a surprise as people build their life around what they can do. If can make a trip they will and so those routes tend to stay useful/busy. There are sometimes better routes we could use instead today, but often the existence of those routes 70 years ago set how the city grew and so those are still useful routes.
China has plenty of bureaucracy, however the transport systems seem well designed and well run, at least in big cities. I wonder how much of that is thanks to the scale. They are (or at least were) launching subway in new cities, and new subway lines in cities that have subway already every year. After some time you're bound to get good at it.
In Austin tx they have 30inch eink screens at all the stops. They update with new routes and schedules regularly. I admit I don't know the flexibility or if decisions are made years in advance though.
Cities in the UK are adding new bus routes all the time, why wouldn’t you be able to do that?
Philadelphia Republicans are proposing cuts to bus and rail service including a 9 PM transit curfew. Expanding service is more difficult than you may think in the US because transit is underfunded and the 1st target for cuts.
> including a 9 PM transit curfew
What the hell? That just seems bonkers. Here, the city council is berating the transport authority for slow rollout of 24 hour routes...
Where I live, most routes don't run at all on Sundays or holidays, and even the days they do run it's only once an hour. I suspect these are typical US service levels.
Berlin and Hamburg, both in Germany, would like a word.
These concepts have been popping up in the last few years all over the world.
The Shanghai example is special because it uses actual busses, and actual stops.
Now, demand calculation in the west is easy: Students always go from where they live to the school they are being schooled at in the morning, and return either at around 1pm or around 4pm. You don't need a fancy system to put those lines on the map: check when school ends, add 15 minutes, then have busses drive to major population centres (with smaller villages being served similarly when the bus arrives).
The elderly want to go to and from doctors, and to supermarkets. That, too, is easily manageable in the 'students at school' ofttime and follows similar patterns.
Workers are similar, especially for large workplaces. Smaller workplaces - now it gets interesting, especially when there is some movement between workers and places of business (and, as a third aspect, time).
In Shanghai, that only is possible because you have a large overlap between
1. people who ride public transit and 2. are tech-savvy enough to use the demand-calculating system. Also 3. as you are essentially making schedules to plan around obsolete, you need to provide enough service that people aren't surprise-lost in the city because the route changed randomly.
Where I live, public transit is used by students and the elderly (who don't do 'internet things' and pay for their ticket in cash, with the driver. The essential young-adult to middle-aged population doesn't use public transit, because it is too slow, too expensive, and too inflexible for their work schedules. Good luck getting the critical mass of data to design bus routes there.
People always think that 'dynamic' is some magical solution. The reality is where people live and go doesn't change that fast. And once a bus route exist and people use it, you need a very good reason to remove it. And stations almost never move.
Re-planning your network once a year is plenty.
More importantly, if the routes do not change often you can plan around them. If the routes change all the time you never know if you can use them today and so you soon give up even checking.
> lack of bureaucracy
Huh? Chinese government is insanely bureaucratic.
It’s true that if there’s something the govt wants they enlist the entire bureaucracy in favor of that and make it happen rapidly, but just because the bureaucracy can be functional, and even effective, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
I mean, that’s basically the definition of a bureaucracy, which while some may treat the word as synonymous for inefficient or incapable, it really isn’t, and the Chinese bureaucracy is proof of that.
> Huh? Chinese government is insanely bureaucratic.
Indeed. It takes a pretty big bureaucracy to be able to ban the wikipedia. Oh, and ban gmail & all of google. And all news sites in general. Can customize your bus schedule though I guess.
Nice non sequiter
> the lack of bureaucracy to just do things like this
sorry to disappoint you but Shanghai is the place where ride-sharing wasn't even allowed in its main international airport just 12 months ago. bureaucracy mixed with corruption is at shockingly bad level.
I used DiDi from Pudong to Hongqiao around 6 years ago. Was there a span in between where it was a no-go?
Yes the policy quickly gathered enough public backlash and has been cancelled
Some Europian countries ban ride-sharing in their entire territories, not just airports.
https://www.ncesc.com/which-european-countries-dont-have-ube...
So Shanghai seems indeed low-bureaucracy, in comparison.
Did Uber actually offer ride-sharing in these places? I feel like it’s just branding to avoid being called a taxi app. Only place I’ve seen ride-sharing in use was the US.
Dollar vans are a lot like this and all over. They will take you where you need to go as long as it isn't too far off the "route"
> China is the only modern country that has both the capability and the lack of bureaucracy to just do things like this
Habibi, come to the UAE or Qatar
Excuse my ignorance, but don't UAE/Qatar mostly use it to build malls and vanity projects? That's at least the media stereotype I have.
The Roads and Transport Authority of Dubai is by far the best government authority I have ever interacted with, worldwide.
Once I had an issue with bus routes for my father's employees (similar problem, high density route with fewer routes). I put a request on their dashboard from abroad and within days, their reply came back with them confirming a trio of new buses to cater to that route.
Another time, I had an idea for bus route planning (not related to above, that relied on a simple ping system for bus driver notification). I sent an email describing the idea in short to the Emirati CEO of the bus authority, and within 15 minutes, he acknowledged my email and connected me with his advisor to set up a meeting the next day. The advisor (an Indian with a US PhD in urban transport systems) discussed my idea through over a meeting.
Oh, and there are self-driving bus demos currently happening in Abu Dhabi right now.
> Once I had an issue with bus routes for my father's employees (similar problem, high density route with fewer routes). I put a request on their dashboard from abroad and within days, their reply came back with them confirming a trio of new buses to cater to that route.
Well, that's what happens if you can just throw money at problems. In Germany, it would most likely get rejected because there are no spare buses/drivers or budget for the fuel, and even if there was money it would likely be delayed for at least one year because the new route would have to pass through the usual tender/bid system first.
Oh wow, that's pretty mind blowing!!! Thanks for sharing
There’s no shortage of malls in UAE, but also there’s fantastic infrastructure — great roads, a metro system, a country-wide rail system (open for cargo, opening for passengers soon). As for “vanity projects”, the Palm and both Burj’s are commercial projects that are also highly successful tourist draws. I can see an argument that the Abu Dhabi branches of the Louvre and the Guggenheim could be seen that way, but I think it’s fairer to see them as cultural investments.
I guess I see the unfinished projects as being the proof: The World and the 2nd Palm haven’t been finished because they (I assume) stopped making commercial sense to the developers.
I would finally note that Dubai specifically has little oil and gas wealth. Maybe 1% directly and 10% that comes as subsidy from AD which has plenty. The rest is literally just a combination of smart and commercially savvy governance combined with an essentially unlimited amount of desert to build in.
Yes.
And slaves.
Lots and lots of modern day slaves.
Thanks for the perspective!
Except Singapore no longer has a large amount of jungle to build on.
Their land use and transportation policies are certainty not first rate. And from what I can observe and read, it seems quite a mix bag, rather then a highly integrated system. Doing totally unnecessary things like building a single monorail, because monorails are cool or something. Rather then an integrated standardized rail system.
And in terms of overall development strategy, its very often very Americanized. Big highways, big highway interchanges. Dubai is known for basically building everything along a very big highway. There is no reason for a country this small to ever have a highway this large.
Given how trivially easy they are geographically their modal share in public transport is not very high at all.
Lot of slavery involved though.
"Slavery"
Surprise surprise, it's "employment".
It's amazing what you can do with unlimited oil money and no worker rights, yes.
> It would take years to make a single new bus route in any city, I don't think I've ever even seen that happen.
This is simply not true. Madison, WI just finished a massive revamp of their entire bus system where many existing routes were re-aligned or replaced with rapid transit routes with dedicated lanes. Despite massive amounts of naysaying from local conservatives the project has been a massive success and has resulted in a huge bump in ridership [1].
The whole thing happened because the city elected a mayor [2] who was laser focused on making transit happen and just kept working on it.
I think US politics has a major incentive alignment problem - if your local politician's genuine personal success metric is "improved transit" then you're likely to end up with improved transit. If success is "got re-elected", "got more corporate donations" or "used mayorship as a stepping stone to national politics" then you're likely to end up with a milquetoast compromiser who never does anything of substance because they don't want to be accountable for anything.
[1] https://www.channel3000.com/news/madison-metro-sees-brt-wind...
Would be nice to find a middle ground - fast action with public input, not instead of it
How making rules crippling public transport? Obviously not everything is great in the west or here where I live but I prefer it to gutter oil or play doah buldings. China is far from perfect as well.
There are pros and cons to each system, of course. But I'd expect the looser system to produce more innovation.
In expense of peoples lives and well being. You can also say that Doctor Mengele helped to advance modern medicine and you would be right. Still this would be really inhumane view of the world.
Transit doesn't need innovation. we have been doing it for a long time. Iterate on what is know to work. Small change is generally best.
Innovation is not needed. Overhaul is perhaps needed, but all the innovations needed to get high market share are already known in the world.
Most of what is lacking is the money needed to run that service. That is not an innovation.
What the hell are you talking about? Is the only place you have ever lived Huston or something?
Try visiting Switzerland, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and so on.
When rural trains in China run as well as Swiss trains, come back to me.
The moia service in Hamburg Germany offers virtual stops which is the next step I would argue. The bus follows a different route and stops every time based on the need of current passengers
What does that mean? The links doesn't help explain it much?
In the UK/London there are some bus routes where you just stick your arm out and the bus will stop to get you where you stand ("hail and ride") and equally you can just ring a bell when onboard and the driver stops as soon as there is somewhere convenient to let you off. The route is fixed though.
Is it that sort of thing?
So there are virtual stops all over the city. You book a ride let's say city center to your home. The service integrates this route into existing rides or create a new ride. It might stop 5 times on the way to your home and pick up people and drop them. And you as a passenger won't know the route in advance. And it will not be the fastest to your place in most cases.
I guess this is what you call "ride sharing". It is like your parents picking you up from football and realizing the kid from the other part of the town also needs a ride so they make a huge detour
What routes are those? I thought you can only be picked up/dropped off at designated stops
Many routes have "hail and ride sections" without designated stops. You can't get off, but can hail and get on at any point. Here's a list for London [1].
[1] https://bus-routes-in-london.fandom.com/wiki/Hail_and_Ride_b...
The route through my village is hail and ride although most of the bus drivers seem to disagree.
This is just a shared taxi, no? They have existed for a long time at small scales. For example airports and hospitals often have such services.
It's a crossover between busses and taxis; they operate on demand like taxis, but only get you roughly the most direct way (they can drive detours to pick up other passengers on the way) in a roughly predetermined amount of time (a 20 minute drive usually takes about 20 to 30 minutes due to the detours) from roughly where you are to roughly where you want to go (they are only allowed to stop on a virtual grid of bus stops spaced around 250 meters apart).
> a 20 minute drive usually takes about 20 to 30 minutes due to the detours
That variability makes the whole system much less interesting once a change is involved, e.g. if the on-demand shuttle is only supposed to operate across the local area, but not for longer journeys traversing the whole city, especially if the connecting fixed-route transport runs less than every few minutes…
Or even without changes, but when you have some other external schedule constraints, because in those cases you always have to budget for the longer journey time, negating the benefit of direct routing somewhat.
I was going to say this! Moia is pretty awesome
Tangent:
I’ve often thought that it would be great to let people design their own political districts to reduce gerrymandering
At the polling place you’d get a map with your census tract and then be asked “which two or three adjacent tracts are most similar to your community”. Eventually you’d end up with some sort of gram matrix for tract-to-tract affinity, and then you could apply some algorithmic segmentation.
Two problems:
- this is far too complex for most voters to understand, much less trust, what’s happening
- the fact it’s “algorithmic” would give a sheen of pseudo objectivity, but the selection of the actual algorithm would still allow political infouence over boundaries
Gerrymandering is much more favorable in a FPTP system of elections than other types of elections. Winner takes all really incentives doing whatever it takes to keep winning.
Instead of your quite complex idea of segmentation, entities should simply move to a slightly more complex election system than FPTP, but which has reduced incentive for gerrymandering. For example, systems that give parties some seats based on the percentage of votes they get in the whole country/province etc.
I agree that ftpt sucks, but there’s still a need to determine boundaries for various administrative district to handle geographically dependent issues.
My country has a psuedo algorithm in law that guides how to draw these boundaries. It basically forces each constituency to be convex. There is still some freedom in the process, and there is still some gerrymandering, but harder than in some other countries.
Simply not having dynamic districts and having as many representatives for that area as there is population is a far better solution.
And its also makes more sense, specially in historical places. In Switzerland, the idea to move around political and voting districts dynamically would be deeply a-historical.
Its simply the case that if more people move to an area, that area gets more people that represent it in parliament.
But the US for various reasons, focused on single representative districts. Those are good for some things, but also cause many, many problems. The positives are that it makes it easier to campaign, because you ahve to convinced fewer people. And its proven to generate a diverse set of candidates (assuming no gerrymandering). But its also easier to gerrymander, and it doesn't necessarily give the best overall set of candidates for a large groups of people.
Modern research suggest that using a propitiation based multi representative district is a far better solution.
For a well researched system for that, I would suggest: https://www.starvoting.org/star-pr
So create a few big districts, then use a good voting system.
Comment 2: I have actually had the same idea as you in a slightly different context. My country is in urgent need of creating new smaller provinces by dividing the existing ones. But there is wide disagreement on what the boundaries should be.
One method would be to decide the capitals of the new provinces, and then ask people in each district which province they would most like to join. If there is contiguous land to the winning provincial capital for every district, then the solution just pops out.
Why does it need smaller provinces? For voting reasons or other reasons?
You can separate the political and the voting districts, at least when you are voting on higher levels.
Also there is a question if you want to expand the current system (ie more provinces), or if you want to add a new layer into the chain (ie sub-provinces). Both can be good depending on what you want to achieve.
Britain is currently introducing new layers. They have new district mayors for new major regions.
But Britain is quite strange in how their system works, mostly because they has not been a real revolution for 800 years.
What has happened over the past few decades is that all the provinces have spent most of the development budget in the area close to the provincial capitals. The reason is a mix of governments operating on limited budgets prioritizing certain areas to get maximum short term gdp growth, and ethnic racism/corruption/etc.
Now, people in the undeveloped areas correctly feel like they are not represented by their governments. Creating more provinces means more spread out development. It also prevents the largest province from bullying the federal government into complying to its whims.
There are already 1.5 administrative layers below provinces (thanks to Britain I might add), but they don't function well at all. But that discussion cannot fit into a HN comment.
To be sure, this is to large a discussion. As a method for spreading development increasing amount of regions and cutting some down some large can be good.
Switzerland where I live very much has this, with 26 top level provinces and only some 8 million there is and a crazy amount of localism, mostly only have 100k people. Each with their own school systems, their own tax polices and almost everything else too. That is of course because of a history of slowly growing together with many compromises (and a civil war thought about the issue of centralization in 1847).
Most former colonial powers preferred to set up provinces as that requires less people to administer and control, and nobody cares about the hinterlands anyway, as long as there weren't major resources there.
So I think this is a good policy. But system do need to be in place to make sure these areas work together on things like transport policy. This is still a major struggle here.
Borders should be simple - either natural geography (rivers) or squares that are some fixed increment of a km.
Well, the districts are already there and have been mostly unchanged for decades. There is a lot of administrative history tied into specific districts. So splitting a single district across two provinces will not do. So the new provincial borders have to across existing district boundaries.
The problem is that constituency is about answering the question "who are my people?". Like, why don't we have an MP for tech workers and an MP for grandmothers? Why do constituencies need to be geographical?
So that your representative can address local issues like a hospital being closed or a new road being built.
I care more about my demographic, my profession and role in society then I do about the local area I happen to live in right now. Geographic constituencies are a relic of the feudal past. Sure, local issues should be discussed at some point but it's really not a good way to represent the population and the actual range of viewpoints in society.
I would say geography is very relevant for local government and regional govenrment. But maybe for federal government its not as relevant.
How would federal voting work in your system? Are there any actual proposals? How would you form a parliament?
> which two or three adjacent tracts are most similar to your community
From gerrymandering to gentrifying in one easy step ;)
There are good reasons to force some mixing or suddenly your area only caters to the rich people while the non-similar area is known for making all the hard decisions for all the problems.
I also wonder if it would be stable enough over time
surely then the census tracts would just become the new thing to gerrymander
Sounds like something we tried in Helsinki metropolitan area 10-15 years ago. I think it was shuttered due to low demand. Existing paths were already following population density, so there already was maximum availability for bus users.
Where I think it is most in use as a separate program is picking up elderly people. Retirement homes have minubuses picking up people and driving them to centrew and back. The users don’t have to abide by a busier standard bus schedule and the bus is more accessible by the elderly.
Train/bus services change every year here in Switzerland, but based on usage data rather than voting, which seems like it could be gamed.
Routes actually don't change that much, is mostly the schedule. The article however is more about the route and less about the schedule.
I love the Swiss approach to things. Possibly the only sane country.
Combining both could be powerful
Sounds like minibus in Hong Kong with extra steps - we have been doing this since eternity. Driver just ask where people would stop in advance, sometimes an entire area would be skipped if no one goes there
How does that work out for someone in the unpopular destination who wants to leave?
There is a loosely defined route that still needs to be followed. You just shout you want to leave when you are near your destination. Or the driver would ask/shout is there anyone going to XXX area when it is near, you are supposed to say yes otherwise it gets skipped
I guess I’ll add an example. Let’s say the minibus mainly goes from A to B, but pass through C in the middle. Dropping people off at C is often a non-trivial task that may takes a couple of extra minutes so you need to tell the driver in advance
No, I mean, what if there is someone at C that wants to catch a bus, but all the buses are skipping C because no-one already on the bus wanted to go there?
Well, you take other transports. Or call the minibus company and sometimes they’ll arrange for you. Hong Kong is a bit unique though, that most people go to one or two areas for work, so the minibus is probably already full at C in the morning anyway
Red minibuses to be more specific.
Chiming in from Los Angeles, USA to say wow, must be nice living in a modern society that prioritizes public transit and peoples' ease of movement. I know, I know, it comes with trade offs of living in an authoritarian state, but the absolute abysmal state of infrastructure in this country is maddening. Ever been on a train in Denmark or Japan or Switzerland?
I once rode the bus across LA. Years and dozens of countries later, it is still probably the single worst public transit experience I've ever had.
It wasn't because of the bus itself, or the routes, or anything like that. But because the willingness of people to tolerate one passenger screaming, threatening others, refusing to move for a handicapped woman, etc.
American public transit is a cultural problem, not an infrastructure one.
Dude, I have only ever rode busses in Europe, but such incidents are bound to happen, even in the most posh areas of the continent.
These incidents happen on a regular basis on public transit in California, and on that trip similar things happened to me a few other times. It's not comparable to European transit systems at all.
Only because in Europe so many more people ride transit. The number of people who will be like that is generally fixed per population, and so if you have a lot of other (normal) people riding they a smaller %.
As a daily commuter on la metro bus and rail these incidents aren’t as common as people make out online. Nor do they ever really affect you when they happen.
Truly the worst of both worlds that we now have authoritarianism without good public transit.
I don’t see what this has to do with authoritarianism. If anything it is an example of the opposite.
Authoritarian regimes traditionally touted public transit. From "he made the trains run on time", the German autobahn (which actually predated a certain party) to the lavish halls of the Soviet subway stations, to China's highspeed rail networks, public transit is just a thing that strongmen like to do. And absolute power certainly helps when you want to plow a road/rail/bridge through a neighborhood.
I watched an in-flight documentary about the architecture of soviet rural bus stops. Each one of them looked like it cost most than the neighborhoods they serviced.
But you cannot have good public infrastructure without a strong state (strength on its own isn't authoritarianism).
A lot of western governments are rather weak, I swear baumols cost disease and spiraling social/retirement/debt spending has crippled their ability to provide for the public.
Of course. Plenty of countries do. It is not that one requires the other. It is that when authoritarians came to power in the last century, many of them initiated lavish public transport projects.
Famously authoritarian pre-1950s USA [1]...
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-08-31/why-is-am...
I guess where you come from definitely determine how you think: the bus stops look better than neighborhoods does not offend me, it actually shows collectively you can have something better than on your own, which makes a lot sense to me XD
Public transport is in a lot of ways an aggregate expression of state power. It takes a lot of state capabilities to be able to execute public transport well.
"Not every authorian regime" cars are just as authorian see Gulf states. I have a hard time seeing anything less opressing than a 2 tonne hunk of steel that you need to bring along everywhere.
It is such a tiresome trope, with people gushing over cars. We do not live in 1950 anymore.
I don’t know. This check and balance thing is not exactly working out here.
Los Angeles feels like countryside compared to Shanghai though.
Seems like the form of government doesn't really matter, you can find examples from literally any end of the spectrum of better public infrastructure
Suffrage is at the top of the hierarchy of needs, with decent infrastructure, decent wages, and public safety being much more fundamental needs for many people. There’s a reason that so many Filipinos, Indians, and Pakistanis choose to work in the Gulf.
>ease of movement
>authoritarian state
China has high speed rail. When you enter the train station security checks your national ID then screens your person and belongings. Buying a ticket requires scanning ID. Going from the station down to the platform requires scanning ID. On the train sometimes police come aboard and check everyone’s ID. When you get off the train you have to scan ID. Riding the bus or subway was one of the very few things that does not require scanning national ID or registering an account linked to national ID. However if you ride a bus into Beijing there are checkpoints requiring everyone to get off, get searched and show ID.
AFAIK it’s the same in places with high security risks, like Turkey&Israel.
I despise this, not because I’m worried about the government but because it makes me feel restrained to act in a specific manner because this is not my space and I’m being watched. It’s dehumanizing.
In most of the Europe you feel like you own the place even if there are many rules. In Eastern Europe it’s even better, you feel free and nobody is watching you. The government and the wider system feels non-existent(which is the other end of the spectrum and can result in unmaintained infrastructure but it does have its charm).
On the other hand, you guys are early on in the authoritarian journey. We shall see a few years down the line if and how things get ugly.
You seem to get quite hung up on ID
Fortunately Greyhound in the US are resisting ID sweeps on their buses.
Mexico City has excellent public transit without the authoritarianism.
I love Mexico, had a very nice time there and would return, however there isn't without issues including authoritarianism, even if it comes from armed groups instead of the goverment.
I don't think it's fair to consider cartel crime as authoritarianism. Usually crime is associated with inadequate government authority. Which is definitely an argument you could make about Mexico... but it's very different from China.
I think the people that unfortunately where born on the wrong Mexican state would be of a different point of view.
For them we are comfortably discussing semantics on an Internet forum.
So does Melbourne. (Yes you can nitpick lots of things, but overall it works and gets slowly improved)
I have been on trains in Denmark a plenty and our public transport planning is slow and bureaucratic.
We could learn from this example - both in major cities and areas where demand is too scattered to justify regular routes.
Now we just have incompetent, horrifically corrupt authoritarians hell bent on dragging us back to oil and coal.
No, but tell me about the trains in Canada or Australia or New Zealand instead. Curious what high speed, modern trains these nations have compared to China, or are they more backwards?
This is a silly comparison. How many cities can China connect with trains vs Australia's 7 cities spread over almost 4k km in both axes... It's not as much "backwards" as requirements are vastly different. Melbourne-Canberra-Sydney could be useful and is getting started now, but I wouldn't expect more for decades.
China is so much more modern, progressive, and advanced than Australia
Go protest against the government in both countries and see which is more progressive.
You have no idea what China being advanced compared to Australia has to do in a thread replying to someone claiming China is advanced compared to America?
They don't have high speed trains
Anglosphere countries are highly car dependent.
There’s a lot of excuses but in the end America can’t live in the future because of its culture.
People will say stupid stuff like "oh it’s because we pay for their defense", or "oh it’s because we have freedom", or "but but this would never work here, because we’re really different than anyone else".
But actually? It’s because we’re used to this shit and change makes us uncomfortable. We also really only care about ourselves, not our broader community.
Have you ever wondered why we have vertical gaps in public bathroom stalls? Inertia. There’s no reason to have them, but nobody cares enough to improve it. A better design isn’t more expensive or more difficult, we just don’t want it enough to make it happen.
We’re stuck in a local maximum.
Ironically China used to have public toilets without doors. Only separators to your sides. It was more than 10 years ago, I don't know about now.
> Have you ever wondered why we have vertical gaps in public bathroom stalls?
You mean the gap between the floor and the walls? Isn’t that for ease of cleaning?
You mean horizontal, at the bottom of the door. That one can be justified by ease of cleaning.
I mean vertical at the side of the door. You can literally make eye contact with the occupant as you walk by.
Oh. You'll be relieved to know my office stalls are constructed in a way that the panels overlap those gaps. You're right it isn't hard, basically the door just opens in and is wider than the opening. There's no way to see in or out.
Maybe they're an immigrant?
Thank gawd for self driving cars…
I hope the end state of self driving will be buses or vans doing on demand routing like Uber Pool is supposed to be but on a larger scale and maybe with fewer points for pickup and drop off.
When I took an operations research class our teacher mentioned they had done a study on Rome's traffic and the best solution (optimizing for travel time etc) was mini-buses (~20 people) serving shorter routes.
Alas, nothing came of that study, and traffic in Rome has not improved in the incurring ~30 years.
I'm glad that Shanghai has moved to the next level in public transportation in meeting customer demand. Most cities don't have the funds to buy smallish buses and labour available as drivers. They don't have the money or willpower to get frequencies to turn up and go levels (ie frequent) and leave people with long walks to widely spaced routes.
The actual money can’t be the issue. It’s $136 for failure to stop at a stop sign in WA. If they enforced that for 30 seconds per day the cities would be wealthy beyond belief.
Or maybe not-but we’d have much safer traffic! Thus enabling revenue from fewer deaths.
But I digress- the problem with “revenue” for cities is they actively avoid getting it. If they actually wanted or desired more funds for the city, simply enforcing laws is all that is needed. It’s just not desired to have revenue I suppose, if it means enforcing laws and collecting dues owed.
Yes yes I’m probably being “unrealistic” but honestly? Maybe not.
Law enforcement should not be a primary mean of funding for anything, as this creates a plethora of perverse incentives for lawmakers.
That does not mean law enforcement is bad or unnecessary. It just means that law enforcements primary purpose should be to keep people safe and educate, not to fund the districts
TBH if I suddenly notice a massive change in stop sign or speed enforcement, to me, it'd be more of a signal of revenue gathering than safety. It somewhat undermines my opinion of police since I start seeing them more as a money making tool of the bossman.. I really couldn't care less if someone's speeding a bit or rolling stop signs as long as they are actually paying attention. For all I care you can even run red lights as long as no one is coming..
Fines are a disincentive. If they work what happens to your funding?
It's a cool idea, but this seems like the kind of thing that will have the users drift away and cease functioning.
People will log into vote on their route when they want one, and then have essentially no reason to ever access the feature ever again. With no active users, there will be no way to get "votes" for a route.
One of the biggest caveats of citizen participation programs like this is that, surprisingly, there's a subset of people who don't want to participate in the hassle and simply want to be served quickly. It really depends on how the majority of people in a specific area think about civic participation.
People have lots of things to do in their life. That 10 minutes to use the app is 10 minutes I can't spend on my wood carving (random made up hobby). This is why I'm against these programs - statisticians know lots of better ways to get data that is less biased to people who feel like making the time to submit information. (Statisticians can also tell you what biases they were unable to account for so you can make decisions on if you need to collect more data).
Google already has the daily trip data on a huge percentage of people and could just create and recommend bus and transit routes and times based on people’s existing commutes. Sure privacy issues exist for allowing them to do this but people have given up more personal information for less benefit.
Every city has traffic analysis data. It's how they make transportation decisions. What's neat about this program is that it removes some of the bureaucratic process of selecting bus routes and lets riders decide the routes.
This has been tried in some European countries in the early 2000s, website not app.
People stop using it. Forget to cancel, unreliable service, took too long. As users drop wait times become longer, cascading failure.
Solution was real time dynamic rerouting and bus stop buttons to request the bus. But by then it was no longer wanted and canned.
Yeah, it seems silly to let riders try to design a route that best fits the needs of other people going to different places. Riders don't know how to design good routes. But it seems great to ask riders what places they go regularly and then use all that data to generate optimized routes. If they can change routes regularly they can optimize for actual regular riders. That seems the real value in this "agile" approach.
Everything about this makes sense. I've long-called for similar efforts in America. It's painful to watch my local transit agency (Portland) expend so much money on figuring out transit routes. Endless committees, focus groups, etc, when the state has access to a smartphone-enabled population. Just release an app that lets people request routes and then self-optimize to maximize the number of people willing to take transit. This is not a hard computational problem, but instead we end up with endless committees and bureaucracy.
Busses need a rethink. There needs to a TGV like central hub and spoke fast travel version, with large capacity. And there needs to a a "on demand, collect people to the spoke" mini-bus service. And then there is no - as in "NOOO" option, for any local politician, to make the speed-bus stop at any location else, that is not directly on route and at least 5 kms apart. And the speed bus can not be allowed to be stuck in traffic, so obviously bus lanes it is.
Funny to see this on the front page two entries below the story about Uber essentially introducing privatized bus lines. Imagine if America took a fraction of the energy and money we spend on the military and actually put it towards quality of life improvements like this.
Last year Shanghai celebrated the 100th anniversary of the bus system, so they decorated all of the bus liveries to be a modern take on the historical first busses. They are very cute and easy to use, and a lot of the bus stops have little old LCD displays showing how far away the next bus is.
This is really cool. It's easy to take the number of stops that you think you can support on a given route for the desired schedule and then ensure that you end up with the fewest stops, on average equidistant between the homes of those who use said stops, all based on passenger demand.
I'm still keen to see automated trains in the future - such as the toob in London. We've had the technology for a long time now. So why isn't it possible that trains are routed on a per-carriage basis? If a camera + ML vision sees n people on the platform at 3am, it should be able to dynamically route and link carriages to serve the right number of people + some margin.
It saddens me that such cool/convenient things have been possible for years but that we have no interest in pursuing them since we're all in competition with each other to try to become billionaires. And the real billionaires aren't really interested in making less money.
This is an interesting experiment, but I have my doubts about its effectiveness. I hope someone is tracking how well this works and we get some good research out of it. I'm much more interested in any research paper that comes from this than anything else.
Taking this even further would be to autonomous dynamically rerouting minibuses:
- you have app, and you enter destination
- optimal minibus reroutes itself to pick you up and take you there with mix of walking, while dropping off other passengers too
- minimizes the door to door time that makes cars so optimal
> and take you there with mix of walking
It would be be rather far side for the bus to drop you off, let you walk, and then pick you up again 3 (european) streets over...in the name of 'efficiency'.
No I meant similar to how Uber offers a discount for you to walk a bit to the pickup location.
You request on app, and it sends you to a more central pickup/dropoff points
How does this work in practice? Say someone wants to take a bus to the hospital. But not enough people want to go to the hospital. Will the bus not run and will you be shit out of luck?
You suggest it in the app/website. Others vote on it and a bus route is created based off of that. If not enough people want it then it isn't created and, similar to other bus routes it will be removed if it isn't being used.
take this only as a grain of salt.
It has been tried in many cities before like Beijing, Qingdao, Dalian, Hangzhou and Chengdu.
It wasn't a bad idea, it's just a good route gradually became a fixed route.
This kinda solution wont work in India. People will use relatives phones to vote for the route and get the route approved, but in reality there will be only one passenger
I can’t imagine any transit vehicle in india with just one passenger
I was just making a argument. While deciding a route based on votes, it may show 20-30 people(which can be faked).
But in reality this would be used by 1 person. This route can then be cancelled if the service provider wants due to lower number of passenger(low cash flow).
Then votes should cost some money for the winners.
That makes sense. If it has something similar to a subscription or pre-paid model, then the chances for these kinda scams would get low.
Which would punish low income folks for no real reason.
How? If you want to use the service you pay anyway, right? If you want a particular route you should have some stake in it. (Low-income / low-wealth / poor people ought to get vouchers and/or welfare payments - preferably as a gradual negative income tax.)
How about we give the low income folks money every month rather than crippling the resource-allocation system everyone relies on?
How will that help ?
Scale down the number of seats one notch, and increase the flexibility fully and you've got self-driving vans.
Why would you want such a thing?
This remind me that road router should be walked by passenger rather than designed by designers.
Like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path
The fact that it can go from proposal to route-in-service in just a few days is impressive
this is great. hope beijing will adopted this soon
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
I think this is one of those ideas that sounds good on paper but breaks down in practice.
One immediate problem that comes to mind is that you need a smartphone to take public transit. So if there's a teen without a smartphone, they can't take the bus, nor can someone who's phone died, etc.
One of the amazing things of the current system, as simple as it is, is that it's predictable and doesn't require coordination. You can walk to a bus stop and know that a bus will arrive and take you where you expect to go, same as the last time you've taken it and the time before that. You don't need to look up a map to see what today's route is, or to see where the stop is, or to let the bus know you're waiting for you. You just show up at the bus stop and the rest just happens in a predictable and reliable fashion.
> One of the amazing things of the current system, as simple as it is, is that it's predictable and doesn't require coordination.
In many cities, the exact opposite of that has been true in my experience. I’ve waited at bus/train stops only for it to be 20+ min late or never show up multiple times per week. The unpredictability makes it infeasible as a means of transportation to getting to work or anything time sensitive (e.g., sporting event or show downtown). This is a much bigger problem in smaller cities with rudimentary public transit, but I’ve also experienced it in larger cities like Philadelphia.
IME this is only a problem really in American cities because we put as close to zero effort into public transit as possible. We just plop buses on the road and expect that to do something.
I did also have this experience with the London underground during strikes, but it wasn't a surprise and we could still see when trains would arrive. So, much less unpredictable.
It’s a very American thing to do. Barely fund an essential public service and then cry about how privatization solves all the problems created by that neglect.
We spent 2.5trillion on the military last year. But the minute someone talks about putting money into things that benefit the general population it’s like “where’s the money for free healthcare come from, Bernie bro?” “Can’t give kids free lunch, they need skin in the game” “can’t have free education, something something bootstraps”
Not just America. Europe is not just big cities and Swiss, it happens in Europe too, especially as cities get smaller.
My few attempts to take a bus in San Diego lead me to believe the schedule is for entertainment purposes only.
> you need a smartphone to take public transit
Life in China these days does not support not having a smartphone.
Renting a shared bike, using a public Wi-Fi, ordering at a restaurant, literally everything requires an SMS confirmation now. There are even automated convenience stores that require scanning a QR code to enter. App-based mobile payments (Wechat/Alipay) is pretty much the only payment method ever used. Cash and cards are almost never seen.
Mostly yes but,
I spent ~2 months traveling in Chongqing in 2023, most of the time without a SIM. You can get into most public wifis with a bit of scanning and mac spoofing. All public transport still accepted cash (or transit card) and was extremely cheap. Even if some shops no longer accept cash, there will always be ones that do. Not planning on going back anytime soon but if I ever do, I would not be a fan of requiring internet to deal with public transport.
One challenge with the SMS thing is when I travel from US to Europe I fairly routinely get a local SIM and turn off my US number.
Yeah I absolutely hate the SMS thing.
I usually use Google Fi for almost all international travel (free roaming almost everywhere) but I need an additional local SIM in China because most of the SMS confirmation apps there only support +86 numbers.
> So if there's a teen without a smartphone, they can't take the bus, nor can someone who's phone died, etc.
I feel very strongly that if a teenager is old and responsible enough to take the bus on their own, they are old and responsible enough for a smartphone. Furthermore, it's actively harmful to send your kids out into the world without the kinds of modern tools that would make them safer and more independent.
As for "phone died," well... just find a place to recharge it. It's not particularly difficult these days and I can't actually remember the last time my phone died on me when I needed it.
OP is a really cool demonstration of what we can do when everyone carries a computer in their pocket. Uber in the US has something similar with airport shuttles. Why should we handicap new, shiny things to make them usable without a phone?
> Why should we handicap new, shiny things to make them usable without a phone?
(a) Not everyone has a (smart) phone.
(b) Not everyone can use a (smart) phone.
(c) Not everyone wants a phone.
(d) Not everyone can afford a phone.
(e) Not everyone wants to upgrade their phone to use the newest shiny things.
(f) Not everyone can upgrade their phone (see (d)).
(g) Not everyone opts to put (third-party) apps on their smart phone.
(h) Not all apps are built with accessibility in mind (see (b)).
(i) Some folks are concerned about mass surveillance (see (g)).
(j) Sometimes phones get stolen.
(k) Sometimes phones get broken.
(l) Sometimes phones get bricked.
(m) Sometimes phones get hacked.
(n) Sometimes phone get locked out.
(o) Sometimes apps stop working.
(p) Sometimes cell service goes offline (see Hurricane Helene).
You're an outlier. I can safely say this doesn't apply to the majority of the population.
you made the choices, deal with the consequences.
I find it amazing that people can be like "screw optimizing public services, saving the environment and make things more accessible for most people, I and some others don't like phones"
> j-n: So... you go a day or two without a phone, replace it, and then things work again.
Which still is an option right now, where a lot of things haven't yet been app-ified, but if you follow "Why should we handicap new, shiny things to make them usable without a phone?" to the maximum, things could end up rather difficult in the future. Like if you've been commuting by public transport and public transport is no longer accessible without a smartphone, how would you continue going to work until the new phone arrives?
I highly recommend you volunteer at a soup kitchen some day.
Here in Germany it's fairly common for kids aged perhaps six or seven and up to take public transport by themselves. They might have a dumb phone or occasionally a smart watch, but I rarely see them with their own smart phones.
One of the most important principles of a public transport system should be that it's accessible to all in a lowest-common-denominator sort of way. Anything beyond that is also good to have, but if you don't have that basic level of accessibility, then it's not really a public transport system, it's a luxury transport system. And there are already plenty of luxury transport systems around.
Also, my last phone died on me fairly often, I don't think it's nearly as unusual as event as you're making it out to be.
I don't really get the relation between your comment and mine, I'm sorry. You don't need an address to use the public transport in Germany, for example.
What is your point? For many purposes, a homeless shelter can be used as a physical address for citizens in need.
If I damage my phone or it gets stolen I have to walk home because the dystopian iOS/Android with SIM that requires ID ecosystem here won't actually allow me to simply use other computers I might still have access to so I'd have to equip my children with 2 devices and 2 SIMs in addition to cash, a debit card and an ID card to show that they're entitled to use their bus ticket.
These are incredibly user unfriendly locked gardens that are often adding gatekeeping to services that used to be ubiquitiously available, even in non-totalitarian systems, because suddenly you might need a bank account, an address, a government issued ID, a SIM card and a $100+ device that runs the approved stack just to take the bus.
"Furthermore, it's actively harmful to send your kids out into the world without the kinds of modern tools that would make them safer and more independent."
Interesting. I think there's a balance to be had here. Making our kids "too safe" I think may lead to a lack of resilience. I'll certainly be teaching my kid how to read a map (orienteering), and I suspect the sense of autonomy and self-reliance they'll get from knowing they can get from A to B without needing GPS will be a very good thing.
That said, we probably will get them a dumbphone to put in the bottom of their bag for if they really get stuck. I have no plan to have tracking etc. though. No way.
> One immediate problem that comes to mind is that you need a smartphone to take public transit.
In China, Korea and other places, a smartphone is already the required entrance ticket to public life.
It's a little bit like faulting sidewalks for assuming footwear.
In China in particular a smartphone is the primary means to interact with restaurant menus, place orders, and pay for many things. Rentable battery packs are also pretty ubiquitous.
I once asked an in-law what happens if your phone completely runs out of food and you're hungry. He (jokingly) replied "no phone, no eat".
I didn't get the impression this was totally replacing static routes. Seemed to be augmenting it. But also, while your concerns are valid, I don't think they are large enough to not try these things.
In my experience, on a public bus there is reasonable chance of getting a working USB A socket. But as a private business, it's not a complete replacement of the public bus system, however apps are used by people already to book on-the-fly cheap group taxi trips in Shanghai.
For good or ill, most teens do have a smartphone on them, and even kids are often seen with smartwatches that have tracking, and probably WeChat, and every mall I've been to sells them. On the Shanghai bus and metro, people often use a Shanghai public transport card to pay, they do accept old fashioned cash though too. Powerbank rental networks are common on the street and non-returns default to purchases (~$14–$28 USD). Malls, and the Metro often has power available for free.
> if there's a teen without a smartphone
I live in Shanghai. Many if not all kids have smart watches with payment apps.
[dead]
These examples are all easily solved.
I.e. replace the bus stops with terminals/kiosks which give you full service, potentially another in the middle of the bus.
Yes! Just use an app to say where you want to go, and it tells you which of the 3 nearest bus stops to go to, and you get where you want to go reasonably quickly. No bus routes, just dynamic allocation and routing based on historical and up-to-the-minute demand.
If you tell the system your desire well in advance, you pay less. "I need to be at the office at 9 and home by 6 every weekday". Enough area-to-area trips allocate buses. Smaller, off-peak, or short-notice group demand brings minivans. Short-notice uncommon trips bring cars. For people with disabilities or heavy packages, random curb stops are available.
Then you remove private cars from cities entirely. Park your private car outside the city, or even better, use the bikeshare-style rentals. No taxis or Ubers, only public transit, with unionized, salaried drivers. Every vehicle on the road is moving and full of people and you can get rid of most parking spaces and shrink most parking lots.
It's not rocket science. It's computer science.
Fantasy, because it would allow us to drastically reduce the manufacturing of automobiles.
I suspect it's a pretty hard optimisation problem if you want to be lean. And if you want to overprovision... you end up with something that looks a bit like status quo.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love for this to exist. Just, as someone with optimisation experience, it seems pretty gnarly.
I think the cheapest and easiest starting point would be to offer people a time guarantee if they book, and contract with cab companies to provide capacity.
E.g. a bus route near where I used to live was frequent enough that you'd usually want to rely on it, but sometimes buses would be full during rush hour. Buying extra buses and hiring more drivers to cover rush hour was prohibitively expensive, but renting cars to "mop up" when on occasion buses had to pass stops would cost a tiny fraction, and could sometimes even break even (e.g. 4 London bus tickets would covered the typical price for an Uber to the local station, where the bus usually emptied out quite well)
Reliably being picked up in a most 10 minutes vs. sometimes having to wait for 20-30 makes a big difference.
NYC has this. Bus locations and estimated number of passengers on board: https://bustime.mta.info/m/index?q=M5
If the bus is full then the transit agency needs to run more service. Unless this is a "short bus" or your fares are unreasonably low (free fares are bad for this reason) your bus is paying for itself and you can run more service on that route to capture even more people.
The status quo in many cities is ~5x overprovisioning just in terms of capacity actively on the road at any given time, and way more than that if you count idle capacity. You could overprovision by a lot and still come out ahead.
Citymapper tried something similar in London a few years ago: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/21/citymappe...
I'm not sure what came of it; but I guess it didn't get adopted by the TfL so it never really became part of the transport system of the city.
I tried it out at the time. It was a minibus driving only me around for the price of a bit more than a bus fare.
They did a study for a small- to medium-size town in Germany – based on traffic modelling, it was estimated that an extensive on-demand system with almost 500 on-demand vehicles would only have about the same effect on passenger numbers as simply extending all existing fixed-routes bus routes to run every ten minutes all day (which for a town of that size is a rather good service), but operating the fleet of on-demand vehicles was so expensive that even fully automated on-demand vehicles were significantly more expensive than driver-operated conventional buses (never mind automated conventional buses).
In various countries there are private vans that ride along the normal bus routes, marked with the same numbers as the buses. They work exactly like buses, collecting and leaving people at the stops, but they're much smaller and usually more frequent. I always thought they were an excellent solution- I don't get why there shouldn't be anything in between big, rare, and shared public buses and small, on-demand, individual private cars.
I'm not really aware of many rich countries that operate minibusses in urban areas. The bulk of the cost of operating public transport is labor so there's a strong incentive to scale.
Now if we get Waymo style self driving minibusses, that'd be great. But if the running costs for full size electric busses aren't too dissimilar it might just make sense to standardize on larger automated busses for increased surge capacity.
The most Western place I encountered this was West Belfast, twenty years ago. This was after the peace agreement but before public transport had been fully restored. So there were London-style black taxis in certain areas that operated on a shared fee basis; no meter, you'd get in and agree a price, and there might be other people in there going the same way.
Important to note that this was fully private and unregulated.
Petit cabs in Casablanca work this way, shared fee. I was only there for a few days so I couldn't make out how the metered fare was split fairly and didn't speak Arabic or French, so I usually just held out my hand full of coins and let the driver take what he wanted :^)
gypsy cabs are also a negative externality particularly with unscrupulous actors
I'm not sure why the should "operate" anything. Any taxi or Uber driver could autonomously decide to put up a route sign and start following that route, with a standard ticket price that makes the service profitable.
> So the public transport authority stops running their own vehicles, and instead places tenders for individual routes? And anyone can bid on operating the route?
No. The public transport authority keeps doing exactly the same that it's doing now. Simply, taxi drivers can choose daily to start following a route for shared drives. Nothing else, except maybe some coordination so that the ticket price is known in advance.
Busses cause nuisances so routes are regulated. It is also difficult to operate them at a profit. If you let the market decide freely on a per route basis most routes would disappear.
New York:
https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/interactive-new-...
In Maricopa County, each city has discretion to operate a system of circulators or shuttles. Many of them do. Many of them are fare-free.
For example, in Scottsdale there are old-timey "trolleys" which look like streetcars, but they are just buses with fancy chassis. They operate routes which go through some neighborhoods and commercial districts, such as Old Town, to get people shopping and gambling and attending events.
In Tempe, there are "Orbit" buses which mostly drive through residential neighborhoods. They are mostly designed to get riders to-and-from standard bus routes and stations. You can also do plenty of shopping and sightseeing and day-drinking on these routes.
In Downtown Phoenix there is a system of "DASH" buses which, among other things, have serviced the Capitol area, which is due west of the downtown hub, where buses fear to tread, because it is also the site of "The Zone" where the worst street people congregate and camp-out.
Now all of these free circulators tend to be popular with the homeless, the poor, and freeloaders, but they are also appreciated by students and ordinary transit passengers, because we need to walk far less, and there are far more possibilities to connect from one route to another.
An innovative feature of many circulators is the "flag stop zone". Rather than having appointed stops with shelters, signs or benches, you can signal the operator that you wish to board or disembark, anywhere in the zone. The operator will stop where it's safe. While it is still a fixed route, it gains some of the flexibility for the passengers to make the most convenient stops.
Why be profitable? Charging fares on a free circulator is counterproductive. It costs to maintain and enforce fare boxes, and you’re adding friction to a system that’s designed to bring riders to the main routes. And you’re already running more service! The more successful circulators you have, the more passengers will be using the main system.
Hongkong has an extensive mini-bus network -- the green tops (regularly scheduled and more tightly controlled) and the red tops (the wild west). Also, Tokyo runs mini-buses in the (richest) central core between areas that don't have connecting subways & trains.
Hat tip to Bisrepita for the earlier share.
In my experience, red tops can do almost anything they want -- they can deviate from the planned route in any way that they wish. Also, most only accept cash (is this changing?). Green tops are pretty strict about stops and accept cash or local metro card (Octopus). On a deeper, urban explorer level: The red tops have waaaaay more aggressive drivers. It feels like GTA sometimes.
When riding a mini-bus, you only need two words of local language (Cantonese) to make it stop: 有落 jau5 lok6 ("yau-lok"). (You need to really shout to be heard over the revving engine.) For green top routes, use Google maps. They will guide you on what green top to take. Example: If you want to go hiking in Sai Kung, take the 101M green top mini-bus from Hang Hau metro station to Sai Kung pier. (Google maps can provide directions with the bus info.) Red tops are more adventurous and should only be taken if you speak/read more than a few words of Canto (50-100 words is fine).
Vancouver has 20-person minibuses serving suburban routes. They are what make the rest of the transit system work.
I'm told (but have no idea of how true that is, since my social circles don't intersect it) that New York has a cottage industry of private bus-vans, that sit somewhere between a taxi and a vanpool that get people (usually working poor) to and from work.
Dollar vans are real [0]. Real in the same sense as nutcrackers and bodega kitties: endemic, well-loved, and officially discouraged.
[0] https://citylimits.org/how-nyc-dollar-vans-are-adapting-for-...
They also do less damage to roads. Large vehicles do disproportionately more damage.
They are also cheaper to buy, clean, and maintain.
Visited Florence last year and certain bus lines there were operated by minibusses. I guess some routes with the narrow streets in the city center are impossible to drive with big vehicles.
My fairly rich French city operates minibuses, mostly aimed at old people, which run through the otherwise non-drivable city center. Of course these are short, low-throughput routes.
There’s a regional transit system with smaller buses out where I live about 50 miles west of Boston. My empirical observation is it’s pretty just elderly who take them.
Rich countries have both buses and taxis. These sit between the two in terms of both quality and price. I don't think it's a cost issue but a licensing one.
Hong Kong
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_light_bus
Vienna's Nightlines (formerly ASTAX, now Rufbus) are partially like this.
Example of this in ex-Soviet countries:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka
I don't think marsa, as they're called where I'm from, are the same thing as described here. At least in my home country, they serve routes that don't get enough traffic for a large bus, so they have their own numbers and routes. Usually you would get one if you're going to a small village in the countryside or similar.
Hmm; not sure then. I remember riding one of these in Odesa about a decade ago, from the airport to the city (presumably a route that would be busy enough to have a bus line.)
They operate in post-soviet cities too, especially between microdistricts.
Well I was indeed thinking of marshrutkas, at least as a saw and used them (many) years ago.
See: Маршрутка (Marshrutka), Colectivo, Matatu
That "What if" is a stupid idea that has been around for years. Professionals have written about this extensively - https://humantransit.org/category/microtransit for example. The fundamentals mean it can never work for anyone anywhere - including aliens with some arbitrary advanced technology.
You cannot combine fast, predictable and reasonable journey times with reasonable costs unless you have a scheduled service. If you want a chauffeured limo that is fine, don't pretend it mass transit or in any way better than a private car for anyone other than you.
I had to do a visa-run in Vietnam a couple weeks ago and my trip to the border was exactly like that. After the bus got to their nominal final stop, they’ve unloaded all passengers except me, then made a couple other stops (they took a computer monitor from one place to another??), then finally told me to wait and take another bus, which I didn’t have to pay for. (Both buses were of the micro-bus / marshrutka kind, of course.)
My area has a dial-a-ride service where you can schedule a ride and they essentially make an on demand bus route for it. I've never actually used it though because it's just really not convenient. You have to call a dispatch number to schedule trips like 3 days in advance, and can only cancel 24 hours before your trip. And you can only schedule trips on certain weekdays (doesn't run on weekends at all) depending on which city/town you're leaving from or going to.
A good example of how good ideas can suck with bad implementation.
NYC has a paratransit system where you can essentially do something like this if you have a disability that stops you from taking the train (there's still lots of subway stops without elevators, etc). From my understanding it's nice in theory but borderline unusable given delays, ahead-of-time scheduling, and the endless gridlock in the city. So basically there to tick an ADA box...
No, it is an example of why the idea is bad and always will be. Experts in transit have written extensively about this. https://humantransit.org/category/microtransit for example.
This will never work in US for two reasons:
1. removes control from local authorities - "we are supposed to decide for our citizens, not them"
2. NIMBYs will oppose the bus passing on their street - "too much noise, peoples, ..."
> NIMBYs will oppose the bus passing on their street - "too much noise, peoples, ..."
It is funny because nobody ever opposes Amazon or UPS trucks...
I think if we can get people to use a service, they won't oppose it?
I live on a greenway street in Portland (bikes are prioritized, car traffic is intentionally made difficult), but I would have no problem with a bus route down it. Having said that, I don't bike and I also don't care about Amazon trucks. I've lived in NYC, SF, BsAs, Madrid and Saigon. The performative hypocrisy of people in Portland who claim to want an equitable society and claim to care about the environment, whilst using those talking points to prevent any kind of urban growth or new housing, is shocking. The people who'd have a problem with a bus going down the street are the same ones who lobbied to turn it into a biking street and take away parking in the name of the people and the environment. It's all a lie. A thin cover for protecting their property values. AKA keeping the neighborhood white. There's no racism as safe as the racism you can explain away with progressive corporate-speak and some spandex bike tights.
I tried NOLA for a few weeks in my 20s - loved it, got a job bussing tables at Brennans, moved into a house with some musicians, lost all $4k of my savings drinking and gambling, and called my sister for money to take a greyhound home. I really dig that town, and Portland blows, but I think it's one of the places I'd probably lose my shit in. Some places are just too easy to stay out all night in.. and have a kind of depressing spiral for a habitual drinker/gambler/sex addict. Vegas, Prague, and NOLA are the three that I can think of where I go to the dark places, go broke and get suicidal. Also, not ironically, my favorite places in the world. But I learned that I need to have a ticket out.
Once you're paying the fixed monthly cost of a car (depreciation, maintenance, insurance) it rarely makes sense to use a bus. The exception is when there's insufficient parking at the destination but most cities have already decided not to go that route and it's too late to change it.
> NIMBYs will oppose the bus passing on their street
Why do they get a say on buses? You don't get to veto other drivers even in front of your own house.
Busses will be electric soon, silent then
Even with regular, fixed routes, I've for some time argued the transit operator really need booking apps, on the basis that you really need the data on the full journey, and it'd transform e.g. bus routes if you could offer "there'll be a pickup within X minutes", without necessarily having the buses for it by falling back on renting cars. If you make people give their end destination, you can also do much like what the article suggests, but semi-automatic based on where those on the bus (and waiting at stops) are actually going right now.
Today, ridership gives hard data on where people will go and when given the current availability. Offer a guaranteed pickup, and you get much closer to having data on where people actually would want to go, and even more reliably than people voting on a "wouldn't it be nice if" basis.
This is really a bad idea. I absolutely do not want to explain where I am going anytime I get on a bus or train. In Switzerland, most people just get on because they already have some general ticket for the year or month. And even those that don't, you can just enable 'EasyRide' and as long as that if active, at the end of the day (or when you disable it) it will calculate whatever you used.
And you don't need 'there'll be a pickup within X minutes' because regular bus stops in a developed country already tell you all the buses that will come when. Some like 'Line 1, 2 min', 'Line 9, 5min' and so on.
And for your end to end journey, you can simply open the app and look up your whole journey when you are planning it. If you really don't want to wait a few minutes, you can get there on time.
> but semi-automatic based on where those on the bus (and waiting at stops) are actually going right now.
That's a solved problem with 'request stop'. If its in a city, 99% of the time you stop anyway. For less populated routes, the bus driver can just stop if somebody request its. Its an incredibly simple system that has worked for 100+ years. In Switzerland we even do this for rural trains and it works just fine.
The data companies actually need is this, what bus routes are often full and when. And based on that they can increase frequency.
For example in my city, the main bus line is already really large buses (120+ people) that run every 10ish minutes. And during peak times they run a few extra to increase frequency to 5ish minutes.
In a city, you can run 15min frequency even on the routes that go into the rural area, and for anything else you can do more then every 15min. That fast enough that additional on demand pickup doesn't make much sense.
The most important point is, don't ask people for data just because you want data. If people want to use the app to look up end-to-end journey or buy tickets, that's something you can use. But I sure as shit don't want to open an app anytime I get into a bus, tram or train.
"I absolutely do not want to explain where I am going anytime I get on a bus or train"
And why should the bus driver care about this? You can get off the bus if it doesn't suit you.
It's not an invasion of your privacy for a bus driver to ask where you're heading.
> This is really a bad idea. I absolutely do not want to explain where I am going anytime I get on a bus or train.
So don't. But I want to have the ability to enter where I'm going and get the benefits of better service it could bring. I'm in London - I just tap in with a contactless card, but I'd very happily open an app and pick a destination if it meant I was guaranteed a timely pickup, especially for less well served routes.
I'm all for still letting people get on without indicating a journey; you'd just lose out on the benefits.
> And you don't need 'there'll be a pickup within X minutes' because regular bus stops in a developed country already tell you all the buses that will come when. Some like 'Line 1, 2 min', 'Line 9, 5min' and so on.
I do need that, because buses are regularly delayed, over full and skipping stops. Knowing what the current estimate is doesn't solve the problem.
This has been my experience in at least a dozen countries over the years. You can solve that with over-capacity, but it's incredibly expensive to do so and so won't happen most places. Being able to fix that problem at a fraction of the cost has clear benefits.
> And for your end to end journey, you can simply open the app and look up your whole journey when you are planning it. If you really don't want to wait a few minutes, you can get there on time.
I could. But my experience would be vastly better, if, when I've already looked up the journey, and pressed "go", like I often do with Citymapper for an unfamiliar route, I had a maximum wait for each of those routes.
Not least because if you do this, you could run routes with more dynamic schedule based on demand, and account for unexpected spikes.
> That's a solved problem with 'request stop'.
No, it is not. That tells you when to stop as long as you follow the regular route. If you have information on who is going where, you can dynamically change the routes.
E.g. a route near where I worked often had a very overcrowded leg between two stations. It'd often have served more passengers better to turn some of the buses around at either of those two stations. If you had better data on who were going where and how many people were waiting at other stations, that decision could be taken dynamically, and cars brought in to "mop up" to prevent any passengers from being stranded.
Requesting a stop does nothing like that.
> In a city, you can run 15min frequency even on the routes that go into the rural area, and for anything else you can do more then every 15min. That fast enough that additional on demand pickup doesn't make much sense.
15 minutes frequency is shit. It's slow enough it will cause people to make alternate plans. The routes I would want this on had 8-10 minute pickups and we still regularly ordered ubers for journeys we could do on the bus. The problem isn't when the bus is on time - if I was guaranteed the bus would always show up exactly on time, and never be full, 15 minues would be somewhat tolerable, but the problem is when a delay happens, and the bus that finally arrives is too full to take on passengers.
> The most important point is, don't ask people for data just because you want data.
If you think it is "just because I want data" you didn't get the point.
> I'd very happily open an app and pick a destination if it meant I was guaranteed a timely pickup, especially for less well served routes.
There is nothing about an app that can give you that guarantee. If the system cannot run their current schedule on time data on who wants to go where won't help them. They need to fix their operations to run on time. If their buses are full they need more buses, if they are skipping stops it is obvious that more people want to ride than there is room for without data on who that person is.
Your transit operator already has all the data they need. You need to ask why they are not acting on that data. I don't know if it is incompetence (that would be my expected answer in the US), or they lack the money to run more service. However either way the data they need exists and more data won't help.
Now if the transit operator is competent and has money: more data can help inform what is the best change of all options - but there are better ways to get that data than an app. An app is always limited to those who choose to install and use it (these days phones shut off installed apps that are not in use so you don't get data)
There is a reason well funded transit agencies do not go into that direct, in fact, the are investing many billions going into the opposite direction. Are all these people just really stupid? That is not to say dynamic information about traffic can't help with things, but its very much an optimization, not the core of the system.
The system you advocate sound really good in your head, because an unknown non-existing system that magically sends a car to any place in 5min anywhere and transports millions of people reliability just sounds fantastic.
You don't see how complex this system would be and how instantly hard this would be to implement, and even if somebody did, it would be more expensive and less efficient, and provide less service and less capacity.
Additionally, most of the problem you complain about, already have known good solutions that could be implemented at far lower cost. And those problems are 100x easier to solve then the new system you are proposing.
And what I really don't understand, is why do you think an bad public transit agency that is already bad at running simple buses, is going to do much better if they had to run a, much more complex highly dynamic system. That is just a contradiction. Just do a simple thing correctly first, follow best practices, and then you can experiment some more with experimental stuff.
> E.g. a route near where I worked often had a very overcrowded leg between two stations
So this is already statically known then ... and all the needed data already exists.
> 15 minutes frequency is shit.
That frequency reliable and coordinated with anything else is for low population areas. If you believe in those areas, a public transport agencies would have cars just ready to pick everybody up, you are fooling yourself. That is just the kind of magical thinking you are talking about.
And 15 minutes is perfectly fine for quite a lot of places, many things in Switzerland run at 15min intervals, and its plenty for many things as long as its coordinated with everything else.
> The routes I would want this on had 8-10 minute pickups and we still regularly ordered ubers for journeys we could do on the bus.
You are likely quite wealthy, because most normal people do not order uber if there is a bus in 8min, even if they are sometimes late or a bit to full for your taste. Because if everybody did what you suggested, uber would be oversubscribed and massive surge pricing would happen and most people wouldn't get an uber, and then only after quite some time.
Since you seem to live in London I would just point out that Britain has done pretty badly on transit. For mostly dumb, tourist, reasons they are sticking with double decker buses. These are exactly the wrong solution for most routes. Slow ingress and egress in double deckers increases dwell times, and that's a killer as it leads to bunching and station skipping.
London is far to big a city for these tiny buses on all but a few routes into the outskirts. What they should use modern trams or something like this:
https://www.bus-pics.com/pics/_data/i/upload/2020/06/23/2020...
This can transport 120+ people and much more if you really pack in people.
And lines where this is overkill or not possible because of other constraints, level boarding electric/hybrid bus with many doors and a single level are the right alternative.
These are just some of the many issues with how London runs its system that leads to some of those problems you describe. I'm not an expert on London, but I'm sure people have written about this.
I have lived in Zürich and Berlin, and I have only once in my live skipped a bus or tram because it was to full (because of a fire at the train station). And Zürich has a 96-98% on time rating for buses and trams, and even higher if you account for how often you make your connection, I have only once in my live take an uber in the city, and that was at 3am. And Zürich is still considered a quite car oriented city, and doesn't have a metro like London, where buses and trams often run in traffic and and there are far to fewer bus lanes then there should be. Even some roads that have 4 lanes and run many buses still allows car on all 4 lanes for some dumb reason. But you can plan a reliable network even with that.
For a good general article going over many of these topics, this is a nice one and has some good further links:
https://marcochitti.substack.com/p/getting-bus-priority-righ...
I don't even know if my local bus company tracks when people get on and off. It'd need facial recognition to track each person getting on, and when that person got back off the bus.
This is usually done with WiFi MAC addresses. I know that London did this for tube journeys but I'm not sure anybody's done it for busses. You can also use smart card IDs if there is an RFID payment system.
The introduction of randomised MACs might have put an end to it.
Via Transportation (ridewithvia.com) started out doing pooled cab rides but pivoted to doing what you describe, seemingly successfully. Lots of value for school transit, para transit, etc as well. I have no affiliation with them but I think the model is very promising.
We're piloting VIA Link in San Antonio, TX to add on last mile Uber style from transit stations.
Link: https://www.viainfo.net/link/
Roads to not have unlimited bandwidth. I think this _is_ a good idea, but has to have some boundaries on how it functions or you will gridlock your city by accident.
It's like rethinking buses not as rigid lines, but as flexible, scalable logistics
Which is not something anyway wants. People need ridged predictable schedules so they can figure out how to plan their life. There are spontaneous trips people make (I burned supper - guess we are going out to eat tonight). Meetings sometimes run late, and sometimes end early, sometimes I want to stay around and chat after the meeting sometimes I want to get right home. I need instant flexibility and predictable routes gives me that since I don't have to meet their schedule. Meetings always start on time - flexible routes too often will not be predictable because they detour for someone else. Meetings often don't open the door until a few minutes before - predictable lines mean I can tell the person with the key when I'll be there and I will be right (important if it is bad weather)
Flexible routes remove the mass from mass transit.
[flagged]
> India and Thailand and most of Latin America have great privately operated local transport, from city busses to pickup trucks to regular route taxis, all self-organizing without needing a centralized database to manage them.
Great? I'm from Brazil, it's not great. They supplied a demand where the state failed to do so but the service was far from acceptable. In large cities these private transportations existed in a legal gray area and had to be pried away from organized crime at great cost. In the day-to-day they all physically fought each other for passengers, went over the speed limit to reach them before city buses and made up their own routes.
It was closer to anarchy than "great". Thankfully they're much rarer or non-existant now and the bus infrastructure in most cities is saner than in the 90s.
Did you get hurt by a bus comming here?
Buses aren't communism.
On the sidebar, probably more interesting than this dreary debate about busses, I noticed you altered your spelling to the generally accepted version. It made me look it up, and it was interesting because I've always spelt it with a double-S. According to MW:
>> The plural of bus is buses. A variant plural, busses, is also given in the dictionary, but has become so rare that it seems like an error to many people.
>> Nevertheless, buses is problematic: it looks like fuses, but doesn’t rhyme with it. Abuses doesn’t rhyme in two different possible ways: the noun with the \s\ sound or the verb with the \z\ sound. Words that do rhyme with bus are usually spelled with a double s, like fusses or trusses.
>> When the word bus was new, the two plurals were in competition, but buses overtook busses in frequency in the 1930s, and today is the overwhelming choice of writers and editors. Busses was the preferred form in Merriam-Webster dictionaries until 1961.
>> As for the verb bus—which may mean either "to transport someone in a bus" or "to remove dirty dishes from [as from a table]"—we do recognize bussed and bussing as variants.
[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/plural-of-bus
I would say Gen Z has a very different take on the word bussin
But communism is busses.
I have. But I've never encountered a communist sportscar.
Quite the perspective. I'm not unsympathetic to the idea of private owned and operated public transport.
And those kind of system do sometimes produce some good effects. But they are nowhere near as good and advanced as some of the more managed ones. And even in those countries you mentioned, they are only part of the solution.
There are some things the private market simply can't do when it comes to public transport, or at least not unless you want all city streets and traffic infrastructure to be privately owned as well. How that would look like in practice for a large city is speculation as it doesn't exist.
To have a real efficient public transport system, you need lots of things. Large investment for things like tunnels and underground stations. After a certain size city, you basically need that.
Also private buses can't reserve bus lanes and are thus often stuck in private traffic, resulting in very low speed. The same goes for things like signal priority. Safe dropoffs and so on.
Many of those private systems used many very unsafe practices, caused lots of accidents and many other issues. Like just stopping everywhere and anywhere to drop people of on the streets. Its certainty not as glorious as you make it out to be.
And there are many other problems with those system. They work for locals who are used to them, but often they are very hard to understand for anybody not local. And often they are absolutely terrible for people who are not your typical traveler, like people in wheelchairs, white children or other issues. So its a position of privilege to say 'just walk out onto the 4-lane road, hail down a private bus and jump into it quickly'.
These system also didn't have centralized pay management systems with integrated fairs for different transit modes. That's hugely inefficient.
> Centralized systems are sluggish dinosaurs. They are inevitably both corrupt and unresponsive.
Funny, the two countries knows known for amazing train travel, Switzerland and Japan are very centralized in terms of planning, even when in Japan operations are partly private. And in terms of many of the things mentioned above, more centralization has improved things.
I do not believe buses and trains across Switzerland would be as reliable predictable to every village above 50 people in all the mountains.
Even in some Latin American countries, introduction of BRT style systems has increased rideship and speed. Introduction of those system were very mostly successful.
And of course the US, that partially has functioning public transport has not produced such an amazing public transit systems. That's partly because of regulation but its also because of large issues around land use and primacy of the car in transport planning.
> population playing Uber with its busses
There is good reason most bus system aren't operated like Uber. Maybe its an idea for some limited additional capacity but that's about it. Its a microoptimization.
There is lots of research on public transport and startups like Uber claiming they can do everything better is simply nonsense. In fact, its corrupt politicians who often get lobbied into giving public money to 'fake innovative' startups like Uber instead of investing into public transit that is far more proven and provides far larger capacity.
Go around the world, test all the public transport system in all cities, and tell me honestly that those that are centrally planned aren't better.
Even in Latin America, Chile in the example I read, where the BRT introduction was mismanaged, most people ended up preferring it and the system has increased total usage.
So, some centrally planned systems are great and some are not. I would point out that the NYC subway system, which was the most extensive in the world after London's until fairly recently (when both were overtaken in length by a dozen systems in China), was largely built by private companies during its major growth phase prior to the 1940s. It has grown at a snail's pace ever since. The IRT, BRT, BMT, IND and ISS created much of the network as it is today [0]. This was at a time when there was both a lot of free market competition as well as increasing (but not insurmountable) regulation on what was permissible. To me, that is the ideal combination to generate growth and efficiency.
>> the two countries knows known for amazing train travel, Switzerland and Japan are very centralized in terms of planning
But these are democratic countries, both of which have a long heritage of private ownership of infrastructure, where people finally chose to allocate funding to unified government-run systems, and which take the oversight of those systems very seriously (and are among the most well-known countries in preventing corruption). In such a system, centralization is not enforced top-down, but rather bottom-up; the people are like shareholders. That is, if it works, acceptable as an alternative to a free market. By comparison, in a single-party state, using a government app to request where a bus system you have no control over might stop is only the most illusory kind of control over your surroundings.
>> There are some things the private market simply can't do when it comes to public transport, or at least not unless you want all city streets and traffic infrastructure to be privately owned as well. How that would look like in practice for a large city is speculation as it doesn't exist.
You make good points which explain how the private system externalizes costs, leading to a completely different kind of graft through regulatory capture by private enterprise. Trading the efficiency of a privately organized system for a bloated public system does still incur the same public costs and tolls on the commons, and still encourages corruption. Yes, private busses are a nuisance and an expense on public roads, and make everything more chaotic. (Full disclosure: I happen to prefer a bit of chaos in human affairs). Just to clarify, though: I'm not arguing in favor of a fully privatized road infrastructure to go along with the private busses. That would be as horrific as a totalitarian state's infrastructure. I'm also not arguing that we shouldn't pay taxes to the city or state to run busses alongside the private ones. What I would argue is that it should be left to the voters how much they'd prefer to allocate to maintain commonly shared infrastructure and services, as well as to elect (replaceable) officials to oversee those things.
Having the government be the only source of local mass transit is just as bad as having private companies own the roads. Neither public nor private sectors are immune to vice. Anything that has a monopoly on the market will act like a monopoly, with all the same inefficiencies and the same pressure on competition that's implied, whether it's the government or the local electric utility, the cable company or the only supermarket in town. The only way to deal with it is for the government to break it up. But the best way to ensure that the government will never break it up is for the government to own it.
FWIW, my perspective comes from growing up in a household of environmental and antitrust lawyers... I'm not especially anti-government, if the government is one I can have a hand in electing and the elected officials don't overuse their privileges. I see the dangers of both governments and markets having unchecked power as roughly equivalent to each other. In this case I'm talking about an unelected government. If you quiz me on what I think about Uber using regulatory capture to monopolize private transport by bribing city officials, I would express roughly the same set of views, and I'm glad when government can regulate the market. I just think its purpose is to regulate, rather than to replace.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interborough_Rapid_Transit_Com...
> It has grown at a snail's pace ever since.
There were price controls that destroyed their business. And that was before cars. And Manhatten is a bit of a special case.
I don't know enough about that history and how 'private' these were. And even if it was true back then, I'm not sure if it would have continue to be as good.
I'm not sure we could recreate that world today. But its a good point, it is possible to get such a system mostly privately.
If you have a good book about the details of that system I would be interested.
> But these are democratic countries, both of which have a long heritage of private ownership of infrastructure
Switzerland centralized railroad ownership 150 years ago. That much longer then it ever was private.
And its really only in the 80s when Bahn 2000 was created where Swiss railroads actually separated themselves from everybody else (this is when Switzerland pulled ahead in modal share). And that was very, very centrally planned. In fact, it was only possible because they system more focused on centralizing an appalling plans that used to be local.
Its hard to see how a private market could produce something like the Swiss rail system. Maybe it could happen, but I can't really see how, without turning into a large area monopoly, like US railraods.
> hat I would argue is that it should be left to the voters how much they'd prefer to allocate to maintain commonly shared infrastructure and services, as well as to elect (replaceable) officials to oversee those things.
In my opinion a public system should run so cheaply that it would be impossible for a private operator to compete. Specially not if they are required to pay the same salary, follow the same safety practices and so on.
Its just hard to see how you could create 'fair' competition that also doesn't disrupt peoples lives.
How such a private and public system would work is a bit hard to really comprehend. Specially in a place like Switzerland.
I am not totally opposed to ideas like this, I just struggle with seen large advantages.
> In such a system, centralization is not enforced top-down, but rather bottom-up; the people are like shareholders.
Most western countries are democracies. And centralized system like China can also have good centralized systems.
I think the biggest issue are how allowed and preferred cars are. Even if you allowed private buses in the US, without changing regulation for cars, and land use, its not gone matter that much.
I am much more open to it in middle income democracies like Latin America.
> Having the government be the only source of local mass transit is just as bad as having private companies own the roads. Neither public nor private sectors are immune to vice. Anything that has a monopoly on the market will act like a monopoly, with all the same inefficiencies and the same pressure on competition that's implied, whether it's the government or the local electric utility, the cable company or the only supermarket in town.
I think this is just not true, many things run perfectly well as monopoly. Like many water and utility systems all around the world.
Monopolies have some inherent efficiencies. Not having a monopoly ensures a very high cost by itself. Competition needs to overcome that cost. And I think its hard to prove that it does. The usual ways to get head in competition against the government is just to pay people less. There are just that many clear cost advantages you can get when running a bus privately.
There is some potential innovation in ticketing, but if you separate the ticking system, the complexity of that is rarely worth it.
For example in passenger railroads, I don't think the privatization and competition efforts have yielded all that much, and had negative effects as well. All that effort and cost could have been focused on better things.
But even there, things like the 'West Bahn' in Austria did actually improve the situation in lots of places (and one of the Bahn 2000 people from Switzerland was involved).
Competition in cargo railroads on public access track has worked pretty well, but its most often the cargo railroads from other monopolies that use it.
So I think this is still an unsettled field and I encourage experimentation. But systems that already run well like Switzerland, I wouldn't want to spend a decade interdicting some new experimental system to try new things in this regard.
I think the comment you reply to perhaps fundamentally misunderstands the economics of public transport. You raise good points about the benefits of having central planning for these things, but IMO the most important factor the people often mis is: public transport is not meant to be a revenue generator.
Where almost all the efforts tend to collapse is the misguided and frankly idiotic notion that public transport should be directly self-funding or even profitable.
The benefits of a well functioning public transport - and Switzerland is definitely a great example - are huge, but indirect. It is a force multiplier, it makes the economy function much better by allowing people to get to where they need to be en-masse and efficiently. It multiplies the number of people that can get to the city center and shop there, and by making this journey fast, safe and reliable, people will be more inclined to do it and spend money there. The $1 that is spent on public transport comes back in multiples in terms of commerce that it enables.
Artificially crippling it by forcing it to generate revenue at the source will reduce these indirect benefits.
The tragedy is that the indirect benefits are more difficult to quantify, and often get ignored in the face of punchy public hysteria about how much money is "wasted" on public transport...
NB: I'm not saying that it should be a money sink, cost control is an important function in any organization. It's about the primary objective that public transport should fulfil.
The main alternative to buses is private cars running on public roads. Those public roads are a massive subsidy for private cars. If private cars paid directly for their road usage, then it's much more likely that private bussing could successfully compete.
From the other perspective, a solid mass transit system significantly reduces the need for roads. It's likely cheaper for a city to expand its road capacity by adding buses than by adding lanes.
> Private transit was how the United States was built, all for profit, from the transcontinental railway up to and including the takeover and destruction of the city trolley lines by General Motors so they could put their busses on those rights-of-way.
This is only partly true. The transcontinental railroads got a huge amount from the government. Most specially land, and land that they didn't really even 'own'. It was the US military that made sure that land was available.
And the trolley bus lines were private, before cars this was better, but the right of way was not guaranteed. And once cars were allow the same rights, their business collapsed.
It wasn't really General Motors, that accounts for a very few lines, trolley lines on streets that allowed cars simply weren't possible anymore.
If those trolley lines had understood this problem they would have continued owning the land instead of selling all the land. That was their biggest mistake. But even then, most would have simply turned into real-estate companies, rather then to continue to run the trolley.
> What really matters is that there's valid competition and freedom in both government and markets.
> Transport can always find ways to be both profitable and efficient, as long as there is sufficient competition. But under a monopoly (government or private) it winds up only being profitable or efficient.
If you look at private US railroad history, there were many, many, very inefficient practices. In practice, individual railroad companies were just local monopolies. And those local monopolies did a very, very bad job working together.
> [Side note] Speaking of externalizing costs, I probably wouldn't be the first to note the amount of human waste on railway tracks throughout Switzerland. Just sayin'.
This is a problem that has been dealt long ago. No modern train have this anymore. Well to be more accurate, those trains still run sometimes, but the bathrooms are locked.
But the same happened everywhere on the world.