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.
I mean the public transport infrastructure here is great, and there's a lot to love about the place (it's why I'm still here after all).
But spot on about the mentality. A lot of that great infrastructure here was inherited, and the attitude around it's continued development has been super conservative. Not to mention the Berlin government is borderline insolvent.
Just look at the cluster fuck that was car free Friedrichstr.
Warsaw is great, need to visit Poland again, have a huge soft spot for pączki.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Even just letting people know how full the bus is, in advance, would help a lot with that decision to take a cab etc. There could easily be a map or list of the physical buses and how full they are.
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.
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.
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.
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? I mean they already do that with subcontractors for contingencies etc.
Overwhelmingly however it's cheaper to vertically integrate, and private operators have no interest in taking low profitability routes (which can often be very important due to second order effects).
I will contend that automated busses might change things here a bit though.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
From some googling it appears a major reason for the community shuttles is that they are allowed to operate on narrower, suburban streets than full sized busses and have lower fuel consumption per mile.
I'll concede geography limits are a valid reason for smaller vehicles.
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.)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
Cool, so a dictatorial command economy mostly run by graft and bureaucratic fiat finally puts out an app to ask what people want, so it can attempt to emulate what free markets have been doing just fine for centuries. And this is heralded as a bold step into the future? Why? You might say because everyone's voice counts, rather than what they can pay, but call me a cynic - some people's voices will always be more equal than others in any system less transparent than a cash market.
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. If you leave individuals mostly alone, enforce a few rules to make them play fair, and rid your government of corruption, then people will organize themselves. Centralized systems are sluggish dinosaurs. They are inevitably both corrupt and unresponsive. And the world's biggest country by population playing Uber with its busses is just another temporary way to calm people who want to innovate, as well as to track anyone who wants to travel and to target anyone who wants something that might raise a flag.
I do understand the notion in the CCP imperial court that creating social harmony is a means to secure the mandate of heaven to rule, but harmony imposed artificially is antithetical to social and economic advancement.
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.
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 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...
I think this view is much more prevalent in Europe. As absurd as Elon Musk's little tunnel under Las Vegas was, at the time, the American view was wild enthusiasm that some private company was doing something profitable to improve our lousy transit system. That's how desperate people were at seeing the ballooning costs of never-ending high speed rail projects that never even broke ground.
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. That was the point where it all went wrong, again, because a single conglomeration too large to fail managed to get the government to allow them to monopolize the market.
This is where a control economy and a monopolistic market economy meet in a horseshoe. Monopolistic or "late stage" capitalism is increasingly difficult to distinguish from a command economy. That doesn't mean that the center between them isn't a very productive place. Whether crucial services like health and transport and housing are 20% private like France or 80% private like the US, is a matter worth debate. 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.
[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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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?
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
In the US, it's mostly because the urban planning field was extremely embarrassed about "urban renewal" (rightly so) and switched to a new ideology that just completely forbids ever doing anything in case it's bad for anyone.
It's also partly because they read The Population Bomb in the 70s and literally decided to ban housing/transit in order to stop people from having kids.
Switzerland has a weak federal government. The cantons are smaller than US states, but have more autonomy, and a lot of matters are decided by direct democracy. Yet they still seem to have good public infrastructure.
I mean the obvious is that Switzerland is rich, and money is power.
But it's true that public infrastructure is more dependent on local rather than federal governments. I think the best example of weak local governments has to be the UK [1].
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.
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 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Are you confused about threads? You're the first one saying China is more advanced here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43981378 as an answer to "it doesn't make sense to compare train systems in those two countries". What is even the point you're trying to make here?
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..
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
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean the public transport infrastructure here is great, and there's a lot to love about the place (it's why I'm still here after all).
But spot on about the mentality. A lot of that great infrastructure here was inherited, and the attitude around it's continued development has been super conservative. Not to mention the Berlin government is borderline insolvent.
Just look at the cluster fuck that was car free Friedrichstr.
Warsaw is great, need to visit Poland again, have a huge soft spot for pączki.
ObWikipedia: pączi are a Polish filled doughnut [1] that seems awesome. Thanks.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%85czki
They are indeed awesome, and once a year, everyone eats donuts for Fat Thursday.
https://culture.pl/en/article/fat-thursday-polands-tastiest-...
> 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.
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?
Would be nice to find a middle ground - fast action with public input, not instead of it
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"
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Oh wow, that's pretty mind blowing!!! Thanks for sharing
> 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.
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.
Thanks for the perspective!
It sounds a bit like Singapore.
Except Singapore no longer has a large amount of jungle to build on.
Lot of slavery involved though.
It's amazing what you can do with unlimited oil money and no worker rights, yes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Even just letting people know how full the bus is, in advance, would help a lot with that decision to take a cab etc. There could easily be a map or list of the physical buses and how full they are.
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.
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.
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.
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? I mean they already do that with subcontractors for contingencies etc.
Overwhelmingly however it's cheaper to vertically integrate, and private operators have no interest in taking low profitability routes (which can often be very important due to second order effects).
I will contend that automated busses might change things here a bit though.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
From some googling it appears a major reason for the community shuttles is that they are allowed to operate on narrower, suburban streets than full sized busses and have lower fuel consumption per mile.
I'll concede geography limits are a valid reason for smaller vehicles.
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.)
Well I was indeed thinking of marshrutkas, at least as a saw and used them (many) years ago.
They operate in post-soviet cities too, especially between microdistricts.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
It's like rethinking buses not as rigid lines, but as flexible, scalable logistics
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.
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.
Cool, so a dictatorial command economy mostly run by graft and bureaucratic fiat finally puts out an app to ask what people want, so it can attempt to emulate what free markets have been doing just fine for centuries. And this is heralded as a bold step into the future? Why? You might say because everyone's voice counts, rather than what they can pay, but call me a cynic - some people's voices will always be more equal than others in any system less transparent than a cash market.
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. If you leave individuals mostly alone, enforce a few rules to make them play fair, and rid your government of corruption, then people will organize themselves. Centralized systems are sluggish dinosaurs. They are inevitably both corrupt and unresponsive. And the world's biggest country by population playing Uber with its busses is just another temporary way to calm people who want to innovate, as well as to track anyone who wants to travel and to target anyone who wants something that might raise a flag.
I do understand the notion in the CCP imperial court that creating social harmony is a means to secure the mandate of heaven to rule, but harmony imposed artificially is antithetical to social and economic advancement.
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...
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 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...
I think this view is much more prevalent in Europe. As absurd as Elon Musk's little tunnel under Las Vegas was, at the time, the American view was wild enthusiasm that some private company was doing something profitable to improve our lousy transit system. That's how desperate people were at seeing the ballooning costs of never-ending high speed rail projects that never even broke ground.
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. That was the point where it all went wrong, again, because a single conglomeration too large to fail managed to get the government to allow them to monopolize the market.
This is where a control economy and a monopolistic market economy meet in a horseshoe. Monopolistic or "late stage" capitalism is increasingly difficult to distinguish from a command economy. That doesn't mean that the center between them isn't a very productive place. Whether crucial services like health and transport and housing are 20% private like France or 80% private like the US, is a matter worth debate. 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.
[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'.
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
But communism is busses.
What does that even mean? You've never encountered a capitalist bus?
I have. But I've never encountered a communist sportscar.
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.
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.
It sounds great, but if this idea is a result of cost-cutting then it might not be so great in reality.
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
https://www.hvv-switch.de/en/faq/what-are-virtual-stops/
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
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.
I was going to say this! Moia is pretty awesome
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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
Scale down the number of seats one notch, and increase the flexibility fully and you've got self-driving vans.
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.
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.
I just find this crazy - you can have good public infrastructure without be authoritarian.
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.
In the US, it's mostly because the urban planning field was extremely embarrassed about "urban renewal" (rightly so) and switched to a new ideology that just completely forbids ever doing anything in case it's bad for anyone.
It's also partly because they read The Population Bomb in the 70s and literally decided to ban housing/transit in order to stop people from having kids.
Switzerland has a weak federal government. The cantons are smaller than US states, but have more autonomy, and a lot of matters are decided by direct democracy. Yet they still seem to have good public infrastructure.
I mean the obvious is that Switzerland is rich, and money is power.
But it's true that public infrastructure is more dependent on local rather than federal governments. I think the best example of weak local governments has to be the UK [1].
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0DKsMJl6Z8
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 Switzerland...
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.
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.
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.
So does Melbourne. (Yes you can nitpick lots of things, but overall it works and gets slowly improved)
>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).
Fortunately Greyhound in the US are resisting ID sweeps on their buses.
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
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.
> 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.
Uh, "we" ?
From someone who uses quotes „like this”?
... https://i.imgur.com/swpYbpv.png
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.
https://www.moia.io/de-DE/mitfahren/standorte
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.
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.
No idea what this has to do with this thread. And you lost me at the progressive claim...
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?
Are you confused about threads? You're the first one saying China is more advanced here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43981378 as an answer to "it doesn't make sense to compare train systems in those two countries". What is even the point you're trying to make here?
They don't have high speed trains
Anglosphere countries are highly car dependent.
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?
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
Then votes should cost some money for the winners.
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'.
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.
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.
The fact that it can go from proposal to route-in-service in just a few days is impressive
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 remind me that road router should be walked by passenger rather than designed by designers.
Like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path
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.
this is great. hope beijing will adopted this soon
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.