Bus stops here: Shanghai lets riders design their own routes

https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1017072

by anigbrowl • 1 year ago

493 347 1 year ago

ketzo2• 1 year ago

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.

amelius• 1 year ago

It sounds great, but if this idea is a result of cost-cutting then it might not be so great in reality.

MarceliusK5• 1 year ago

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.

bluGill20• 1 year ago

If your transit operator is competent it is doing studies that look at more than just the people motivated to go through effort. They need to look for people who would use a route if it existed, but can't be bothered to open an app to ask for it - this is likely a much larger group than those who ask for something.

ketzo2• 1 year ago

Well, certainly, a transit operator should be doing their own research — this isn’t a replacement for that.

But this is excellent as a complementary new piece of data, especially one that can be gathered so frequently and easily (especially compared to lengthy transit studies)

aeblyve• 1 year ago

The masses are the real heroes, while we ourselves are often childish and ignorant, and without this understanding, it is impossible to acquire even the most rudimentary knowledge.

-- Mao Zedong

magic123_• 1 year ago

A few years back, Citymapper launched a bus line in london where the route was defined based on the amount of data they had about desired paths from their users that were badly covered by the existing network. https://citymapper.com/news/1800/introducing-the-citymapper-...

I didn't follow closely but it looks like the project got canceled, as https://citymapper.com/smartbus returns a 404.

softgrow• 1 year ago

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.

cryptoz• 1 year ago

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.

moooo99• 1 year ago

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

mulmen3• 1 year ago

Fines are a disincentive. If they work what happens to your funding?

lan321• 1 year ago

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..

parpfish2• 1 year ago

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

permo-w• 1 year ago

surely then the census tracts would just become the new thing to gerrymander

abdullahkhalids5• 1 year ago

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.

parpfish2• 1 year ago

I agree that ftpt sucks, but there’s still a need to determine boundaries for various administrative district to handle geographically dependent issues.

abdullahkhalids5• 1 year ago

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.

bluGill20• 1 year ago

Borders should be simple - either natural geography (rivers) or squares that are some fixed increment of a km.

panick21_9• 1 year ago

Why does it need smaller provinces? For voting reasons or other reasons?

You can separate the political and the voting districts, at least when you are voting on higher levels.

Also there is a question if you want to expand the current system (ie more provinces), or if you want to add a new layer into the chain (ie sub-provinces). Both can be good depending on what you want to achieve.

Britain is currently introducing new layers. They have new district mayors for new major regions.

But Britain is quite strange in how their system works, mostly because they has not been a real revolution for 800 years.

agumonkey• 1 year ago

I also wonder if it would be stable enough over time

viraptor5• 1 year ago

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.

HPsquared8• 1 year ago

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?

aembleton3• 1 year ago

So that your representative can address local issues like a hospital being closed or a new road being built.

panick21_9• 1 year ago

Simply not having dynamic districts and having as many representatives for that area as there is population is a far better solution.

And its also makes more sense, specially in historical places. In Switzerland, the idea to move around political and voting districts dynamically would be deeply a-historical.

Its simply the case that if more people move to an area, that area gets more people that represent it in parliament.

But the US for various reasons, focused on single representative districts. Those are good for some things, but also cause many, many problems. The positives are that it makes it easier to campaign, because you ahve to convinced fewer people. And its proven to generate a diverse set of candidates (assuming no gerrymandering). But its also easier to gerrymander, and it doesn't necessarily give the best overall set of candidates for a large groups of people.

Modern research suggest that using a propitiation based multi representative district is a far better solution.

For a well researched system for that, I would suggest: https://www.starvoting.org/star-pr

So create a few big districts, then use a good voting system.

kr2• 1 year ago

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?

wonnage• 1 year ago

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

petesergeant3• 1 year ago

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.

GrqP• 1 year ago

Thank gawd for self driving cars…

sidibe• 1 year ago

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.

sampton• 1 year ago

I don’t know. This check and balance thing is not exactly working out here.

jmcgough• 1 year ago

Truly the worst of both worlds that we now have authoritarianism without good public transit.

chvid3• 1 year ago

I don’t see what this has to do with authoritarianism. If anything it is an example of the opposite.

drstewart3• 1 year ago

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?

__m• 1 year ago

They don't have high speed trains

supertrope3• 1 year ago

Anglosphere countries are highly car dependent.

viraptor5• 1 year ago

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.

stickfigure2• 1 year ago

Mexico City has excellent public transit without the authoritarianism.

viraptor5• 1 year ago

So does Melbourne. (Yes you can nitpick lots of things, but overall it works and gets slowly improved)

pjmlp2• 1 year ago

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.

dyauspitr• 1 year ago

Now we just have incompetent, horrifically corrupt authoritarians hell bent on dragging us back to oil and coal.

olalonde• 1 year ago

Los Angeles feels like countryside compared to Shanghai though.

kubb2• 1 year ago

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.

jychang• 1 year ago

Uh, "we" ?

From someone who uses quotes „like this”?

... https://i.imgur.com/swpYbpv.png

mulmen3• 1 year ago

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?

stackbutterflow• 1 year ago

Ironically China used to have public toilets without doors. Only separators to your sides. It was more than 10 years ago, I don't know about now.

supertrope3• 1 year ago

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.

m4r1k• 1 year ago

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.

vachina• 1 year ago

You seem to get quite hung up on ID

mrtksn• 1 year ago

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).

pjc504• 1 year ago

Fortunately Greyhound in the US are resisting ID sweeps on their buses.

chvid3• 1 year ago

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.

keiferski8• 1 year ago

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.

geremiiah2• 1 year ago

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.

informal007• 1 year ago

This remind me that road router should be walked by passenger rather than designed by designers.

ars• 1 year ago

Like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path

zaptheimpaler• 1 year ago

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.

petesergeant3• 1 year ago

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

rrr_oh_man4• 1 year ago

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.

pjc504• 1 year ago

It's amazing what you can do with unlimited oil money and no worker rights, yes.

suddenlybananas• 1 year ago

Lot of slavery involved though.

panick21_9• 1 year ago

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.

tw1984• 1 year ago

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.

sudahtigabulan• 1 year ago

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.

presentation• 1 year ago

I used DiDi from Pudong to Hongqiao around 6 years ago. Was there a span in between where it was a no-go?

keiferski8• 1 year ago

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

grumpy-de-sre10• 1 year ago

Warsaw really is booming, visiting from Berlin feels like stepping ten years into the future.

Lots of real (and not paper) economic growth.

xattt• 1 year ago

How does taking transit versus car compare for travel times?

Even in Lisbon, it seemed that public transit was a much bigger hassle, both in time and cost, than a ride-sharing app.

We had a family of 4. Fares are about €3-4 each so €12 per ride in one direction. Ride-shares were about €9. We also abused the intro ride-share offers by creating separate accounts and got that down to €4.50.

dgellow3• 1 year ago

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

0_____0• 1 year ago

Might be USian bias. I've seen bus routes change in the US but not to the degree of adding massive amounts of service.

DocTomoe• 1 year ago

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.

panick21_9• 1 year ago

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.

gnopgnip• 1 year ago

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"

citizenpaul• 1 year ago

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.

mcintyre1994• 1 year ago

Cities in the UK are adding new bus routes all the time, why wouldn’t you be able to do that?

9283409232• 1 year ago

Philadelphia Republicans are proposing cuts to bus and rail service including a 9 PM transit curfew. Expanding service is more difficult than you may think in the US because transit is underfunded and the 1st target for cuts.

npodbielski2• 1 year ago

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.

HPsquared8• 1 year ago

There are pros and cons to each system, of course. But I'd expect the looser system to produce more innovation.

MarceliusK5• 1 year ago

Would be nice to find a middle ground - fast action with public input, not instead of it

panick21_9• 1 year ago

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.

EZ-E• 1 year ago

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.

hshdhdhj44442• 1 year ago

lack of bureaucracy

Huh? Chinese government is insanely bureaucratic.

It’s true that if there’s something the govt wants they enlist the entire bureaucracy in favor of that and make it happen rapidly, but just because the bureaucracy can be functional, and even effective, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

I mean, that’s basically the definition of a bureaucracy, which while some may treat the word as synonymous for inefficient or incapable, it really isn’t, and the Chinese bureaucracy is proof of that.

jeff_carr• 1 year ago

Huh? Chinese government is insanely bureaucratic.

Indeed. It takes a pretty big bureaucracy to be able to ban the wikipedia. Oh, and ban gmail & all of google. And all news sites in general. Can customize your bus schedule though I guess.

codingdave• 1 year ago

Last time I lived in a city was a while back, but at that time Denver updated routes a few times a year. I'm not saying they are the speediest, but I don't know how you are claiming that no new route can be created in any Western city without years of work. That simply is not true.

Or, if you want to go small, my school district changed bus routes with a 48 hour turn around time when we moved to our home in the country, and again when our teenager's schedule changed and he could no longer drive the younger sibling home.

bluGill20• 1 year ago

Routes should not be created or changed often. People need to rely on transit, if they can't be sure their route will still be there for long they should buy/drive a car even if there is good transit today since they will need that car when the routes change to something that doesn't work.

changing routes is needed of course. Cities chanre and you need to follow that. They don't change fast though. long term routes also drive change as people adqust their life to what they can do.

rsynnott3• 1 year ago

It would take years to make a single new bus route in any city, I don't think I've ever even seen that happen.

I live in a city in a Western European country which adds multiple new bus routes a year, and always has done. Honestly I'd assume this is the case for any medium to large city.

The unusual bit about the Shanghai initiative is that, presumably, they have significant _spare_ capacity, to be used for low-volume/experimental stuff like this. Spare capacity is a slightly weird thing for a bus network to have; they tend to run basically on the edge.

quasse• 1 year ago

It would take years to make a single new bus route in any city, I don't think I've ever even seen that happen.

This is simply not true. Madison, WI just finished a massive revamp of their entire bus system where many existing routes were re-aligned or replaced with rapid transit routes with dedicated lanes. Despite massive amounts of naysaying from local conservatives the project has been a massive success and has resulted in a huge bump in ridership [1].

The whole thing happened because the city elected a mayor [2] who was laser focused on making transit happen and just kept working on it.

I think US politics has a major incentive alignment problem - if your local politician's genuine personal success metric is "improved transit" then you're likely to end up with improved transit. If success is "got re-elected", "got more corporate donations" or "used mayorship as a stepping stone to national politics" then you're likely to end up with a milquetoast compromiser who never does anything of substance because they don't want to be accountable for anything.

[1] https://www.channel3000.com/news/madison-metro-sees-brt-wind...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Rhodes-Conway

hayst4ck7• 1 year ago

It's simultaneously amazing to see and a depressing reminder of how badly western societies are crippled by rules of their own making.

It all comes down to corruption. In the west we are accustomed to thinking we are much less corrupt, but that is proving not to be less and less true every day.

Corruption is loyalty to a man over a mission. All systems that have good outcomes are when the man that people are loyal to (because he can punish dissent and reward loyalty, such as with wages) chooses a mission over their own self interest and enforce subordination to a mission over themselves.

China is a country that is capable of punishing their richest citizens, while the US and most of the west are not. China executed the executives that poisoned infant formula. Here in the US, our "law" let the Sackler Family promote addiction and then gave them a slap on the wrist while letting them use the "law" to reduce/avoid consequences.

China has more Rule of Law than the US right now.

Rule of law was thought to be a system where all citizens, including the rich, are protected from the government by due process, but rule of law is when the rich and powerful have limits on their arbitrary executions of power. Law exists to protect the weak from the powerful, law exists to bind power. In the west the rich have co-opted law as their tool.

crippled by rules of their own making.

No, not our own making. The making of our richest. The rules in the west exist to solidify and cement the power of our richest and they use their money to pay for power consolidation giving them increasingly more power to compromise our laws for their interest.

China can do things because their power is working on behalf of their people, while in the west our power is working on behalf of the powerful.

lack of bureaucracy

Who do you think is doing these things? Literally their bureaucracy. It requires people to organize and do those things. Bridges and tunnels don't get built without planning, funding, and execution, which is exactly what bureaucracies do.

The rich people in the west have been so effective at compromising institutions of power that "bureaucracy" is synonymous with "inefficiency." Their bureaucrats are trusted with the power to make things happen, while our elected officials bind their behavior and set them up for failure in order to justify privatizing their functions.

insane_dreamer5• 1 year ago

China has more Rule of Law than the US right now.

Not quite. You either don't realize or are overlooking how much implementation of the law in China, at every level, depends very much on who is doing the implementation. But the US under Trump is quickly heading down the road to where I can see it being worse than China in that respect.

China can do things because their power is working on behalf of their people, while in the west our power is working on behalf of the powerful.

I can't disagree with your criticism of the West, but your statement about China is straight from a CCP propaganda handbook.

China executed the executives that poisoned infant formula.

That was a long time ago, and obviously those executives didn't have the necessary guanxi.

Who gets accused and is found guilty of corruption in China depends very much on who is in power. That much was obvious in how Xi cleared out the opposition from 2013-2017. Bo Xilai is a prime example.

But back to the original topic of public transportation: That's one thing China gets right that the US is totally inept at because it's built on a car culture.

comrade1234• 1 year ago

Train/bus services change every year here in Switzerland, but based on usage data rather than voting, which seems like it could be gamed.

rrr_oh_man4• 1 year ago

I love the Swiss approach to things. Possibly the only sane country.

chrisandchris• 1 year ago

Routes actually don't change that much, is mostly the schedule. The article however is more about the route and less about the schedule.

MarceliusK5• 1 year ago

Combining both could be powerful

yanhangyhy• 1 year ago

this is great. hope beijing will adopted this soon

philberto2• 1 year ago

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/

dgellow3• 1 year ago

I was going to say this! Moia is pretty awesome

mattlondon2• 1 year ago

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?

mimischi• 1 year ago

What routes are those? I thought you can only be picked up/dropped off at designated stops

philberto2• 1 year ago

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

geremiiah2• 1 year ago

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.

janfoeh• 1 year ago

It's a crossover between busses and taxis; they operate on demand like taxis, but only get you roughly the most direct way (they can drive detours to pick up other passengers on the way) in a roughly predetermined amount of time (a 20 minute drive usually takes about 20 to 30 minutes due to the detours) from roughly where you are to roughly where you want to go (they are only allowed to stop on a virtual grid of bus stops spaced around 250 meters apart).

jillesvangurp• 1 year ago

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.

throw3108224• 1 year ago

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.

grumpy-de-sre10• 1 year ago

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.

keiferski8• 1 year ago

Example of this in ex-Soviet countries:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka

datameta• 1 year ago

See: Маршрутка (Marshrutka), Colectivo, Matatu

notpushkin• 1 year ago

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.)

thanatos519• 1 year ago

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.

rich_sasha• 1 year ago

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.

aembleton3• 1 year ago

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.

vidarh3• 1 year ago

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.

HPsquared8• 1 year ago

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.

panick21_9• 1 year ago

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.

dist-epoch• 1 year ago

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, ..."

mcny• 1 year ago

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?

pjc504• 1 year ago

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.

MarceliusK5• 1 year ago

It's like rethinking buses not as rigid lines, but as flexible, scalable logistics

bluGill20• 1 year ago

Which is not something anyway wants. People need ridged predictable schedules so they can figure out how to plan their life. There are spontaneous trips people make (I burned supper - guess we are going out to eat tonight). Meetings sometimes run late, and sometimes end early, sometimes I want to stay around and chat after the meeting sometimes I want to get right home. I need instant flexibility and predictable routes gives me that since I don't have to meet their schedule. Meetings always start on time - flexible routes too often will not be predictable because they detour for someone else. Meetings often don't open the door until a few minutes before - predictable lines mean I can tell the person with the key when I'll be there and I will be right (important if it is bad weather)

Flexible routes remove the mass from mass transit.

lhamil64• 1 year ago

My area has a dial-a-ride service where you can schedule a ride and they essentially make an on demand bus route for it. I've never actually used it though because it's just really not convenient. You have to call a dispatch number to schedule trips like 3 days in advance, and can only cancel 24 hours before your trip. And you can only schedule trips on certain weekdays (doesn't run on weekends at all) depending on which city/town you're leaving from or going to.

jenny91• 1 year ago

A good example of how good ideas can suck with bad implementation.

NYC has a paratransit system where you can essentially do something like this if you have a disability that stops you from taking the train (there's still lots of subway stops without elevators, etc). From my understanding it's nice in theory but borderline unusable given delays, ahead-of-time scheduling, and the endless gridlock in the city. So basically there to tick an ADA box...

bluGill20• 1 year ago

That "What if" is a stupid idea that has been around for years. Professionals have written about this extensively - https://humantransit.org/category/microtransit for example. The fundamentals mean it can never work for anyone anywhere - including aliens with some arbitrary advanced technology.

You cannot combine fast, predictable and reasonable journey times with reasonable costs unless you have a scheduled service. If you want a chauffeured limo that is fine, don't pretend it mass transit or in any way better than a private car for anyone other than you.

ysavir2• 1 year ago

I think this is one of those ideas that sounds good on paper but breaks down in practice.

One immediate problem that comes to mind is that you need a smartphone to take public transit. So if there's a teen without a smartphone, they can't take the bus, nor can someone who's phone died, etc.

One of the amazing things of the current system, as simple as it is, is that it's predictable and doesn't require coordination. You can walk to a bus stop and know that a bus will arrive and take you where you expect to go, same as the last time you've taken it and the time before that. You don't need to look up a map to see what today's route is, or to see where the stop is, or to let the bus know you're waiting for you. You just show up at the bus stop and the rest just happens in a predictable and reliable fashion.

dheera2• 1 year ago

you need a smartphone to take public transit

Life in China these days does not support not having a smartphone.

Renting a shared bike, using a public Wi-Fi, ordering at a restaurant, literally everything requires an SMS confirmation now. There are even automated convenience stores that require scanning a QR code to enter. App-based mobile payments (Wechat/Alipay) is pretty much the only payment method ever used. Cash and cards are almost never seen.

luke-stanley• 1 year ago

In my experience, on a public bus there is reasonable chance of getting a working USB A socket. But as a private business, it's not a complete replacement of the public bus system, however apps are used by people already to book on-the-fly cheap group taxi trips in Shanghai.

For good or ill, most teens do have a smartphone on them, and even kids are often seen with smartwatches that have tracking, and probably WeChat, and every mall I've been to sells them. On the Shanghai bus and metro, people often use a Shanghai public transport card to pay, they do accept old fashioned cash though too. Powerbank rental networks are common on the street and non-returns default to purchases (~$14–$28 USD). Malls, and the Metro often has power available for free.

ffsm8• 1 year ago

These examples are all easily solved.

I.e. replace the bus stops with terminals/kiosks which give you full service, potentially another in the middle of the bus.

sxg• 1 year ago

One of the amazing things of the current system, as simple as it is, is that it's predictable and doesn't require coordination.

In many cities, the exact opposite of that has been true in my experience. I’ve waited at bus/train stops only for it to be 20+ min late or never show up multiple times per week. The unpredictability makes it infeasible as a means of transportation to getting to work or anything time sensitive (e.g., sporting event or show downtown). This is a much bigger problem in smaller cities with rudimentary public transit, but I’ve also experienced it in larger cities like Philadelphia.

SR2Z7• 1 year ago

So if there's a teen without a smartphone, they can't take the bus, nor can someone who's phone died, etc.

I feel very strongly that if a teenager is old and responsible enough to take the bus on their own, they are old and responsible enough for a smartphone. Furthermore, it's actively harmful to send your kids out into the world without the kinds of modern tools that would make them safer and more independent.

As for "phone died," well... just find a place to recharge it. It's not particularly difficult these days and I can't actually remember the last time my phone died on me when I needed it.

OP is a really cool demonstration of what we can do when everyone carries a computer in their pocket. Uber in the US has something similar with airport shuttles. Why should we handicap new, shiny things to make them usable without a phone?

moogleii• 1 year ago

I didn't get the impression this was totally replacing static routes. Seemed to be augmenting it. But also, while your concerns are valid, I don't think they are large enough to not try these things.

sho_hn• 1 year ago

One immediate problem that comes to mind is that you need a smartphone to take public transit.

In China, Korea and other places, a smartphone is already the required entrance ticket to public life.

It's a little bit like faulting sidewalks for assuming footwear.

mldqj• 1 year ago

if there's a teen without a smartphone

I live in Shanghai. Many if not all kids have smart watches with payment apps.

schainks• 1 year ago

Roads to not have unlimited bandwidth. I think this _is_ a good idea, but has to have some boundaries on how it functions or you will gridlock your city by accident.

flakespancakes• 1 year ago

Via Transportation (ridewithvia.com) started out doing pooled cab rides but pivoted to doing what you describe, seemingly successfully. Lots of value for school transit, para transit, etc as well. I have no affiliation with them but I think the model is very promising.

bretpiatt• 1 year ago

We're piloting VIA Link in San Antonio, TX to add on last mile Uber style from transit stations.

Link: https://www.viainfo.net/link/

PicassoCTs• 1 year ago

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.

brador• 1 year ago

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.

gblargg• 1 year ago

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.

dluan• 1 year ago

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.

elric• 1 year ago

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?

aembleton3• 1 year ago

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.

liampulles• 1 year ago

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.

CGMthrowaway• 1 year ago

In most countries in South America there is a similar system of buses called combis (or micros). The buses are private and the routes change at the whim of the driver/owner based on demand, etc. Usually main stops are posted in the front window of the bus (it's messy looking lol)

est• 1 year ago

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.

charlieyu13• 1 year ago

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

tsukikage2• 1 year ago

How does that work out for someone in the unpopular destination who wants to leave?

charlieyu13• 1 year ago

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

sexy_seedbox• 1 year ago

Red minibuses to be more specific.

MarceliusK5• 1 year ago

The fact that it can go from proposal to route-in-service in just a few days is impressive

arjunchint2• 1 year ago

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

Ylpertnodi• 1 year ago

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'.

arjunchint2• 1 year ago

No I meant similar to how Uber offers a discount for you to walk a bit to the pickup location.

You request on app, and it sends you to a more central pickup/dropoff points

sidkhuntia4• 1 year ago

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

pas2• 1 year ago

Then votes should cost some money for the winners.

Loughla• 1 year ago

Which would punish low income folks for no real reason.

sidkhuntia4• 1 year ago

That makes sense. If it has something similar to a subscription or pre-paid model, then the chances for these kinda scams would get low.

kjkjadksj2• 1 year ago

I can’t imagine any transit vehicle in india with just one passenger

sidkhuntia4• 1 year ago

I was just making a argument. While deciding a route based on votes, it may show 20-30 people(which can be faked).

But in reality this would be used by 1 person. This route can then be cancelled if the service provider wants due to lower number of passenger(low cash flow).

xnx• 1 year ago

Scale down the number of seats one notch, and increase the flexibility fully and you've got self-driving vans.

eulgro• 1 year ago

Why would you want such a thing?

originalvichy• 1 year ago

Sounds like something we tried in Helsinki metropolitan area 10-15 years ago. I think it was shuttered due to low demand. Existing paths were already following population density, so there already was maximum availability for bus users.

Where I think it is most in use as a separate program is picking up elderly people. Retirement homes have minubuses picking up people and driving them to centrew and back. The users don’t have to abide by a busier standard bus schedule and the bus is more accessible by the elderly.

anon291• 1 year ago

Everything about this makes sense. I've long-called for similar efforts in America. It's painful to watch my local transit agency (Portland) expend so much money on figuring out transit routes. Endless committees, focus groups, etc, when the state has access to a smartphone-enabled population. Just release an app that lets people request routes and then self-optimize to maximize the number of people willing to take transit. This is not a hard computational problem, but instead we end up with endless committees and bureaucracy.

altilunium• 1 year ago

One of the biggest caveats of citizen participation programs like this is that, surprisingly, there's a subset of people who don't want to participate in the hassle and simply want to be served quickly. It really depends on how the majority of people in a specific area think about civic participation.

bluGill20• 1 year ago

People have lots of things to do in their life. That 10 minutes to use the app is 10 minutes I can't spend on my wood carving (random made up hobby). This is why I'm against these programs - statisticians know lots of better ways to get data that is less biased to people who feel like making the time to submit information. (Statisticians can also tell you what biases they were unable to account for so you can make decisions on if you need to collect more data).

boatsie• 1 year ago

Google already has the daily trip data on a huge percentage of people and could just create and recommend bus and transit routes and times based on people’s existing commutes. Sure privacy issues exist for allowing them to do this but people have given up more personal information for less benefit.

hx8• 1 year ago

Every city has traffic analysis data. It's how they make transportation decisions. What's neat about this program is that it removes some of the bureaucratic process of selecting bus routes and lets riders decide the routes.

AndyMcConachie• 1 year ago

This is an interesting experiment, but I have my doubts about its effectiveness. I hope someone is tracking how well this works and we get some good research out of it. I'm much more interested in any research paper that comes from this than anything else.

nitwit005• 1 year ago

It's a cool idea, but this seems like the kind of thing that will have the users drift away and cease functioning.

People will log into vote on their route when they want one, and then have essentially no reason to ever access the feature ever again. With no active users, there will be no way to get "votes" for a route.

schwartzworld2• 1 year ago

Funny to see this on the front page two entries below the story about Uber essentially introducing privatized bus lines. Imagine if America took a fraction of the energy and money we spend on the military and actually put it towards quality of life improvements like this.

fennecfoxy• 1 year ago

This is really cool. It's easy to take the number of stops that you think you can support on a given route for the desired schedule and then ensure that you end up with the fewest stops, on average equidistant between the homes of those who use said stops, all based on passenger demand.

I'm still keen to see automated trains in the future - such as the toob in London. We've had the technology for a long time now. So why isn't it possible that trains are routed on a per-carriage basis? If a camera + ML vision sees n people on the platform at 3am, it should be able to dynamically route and link carriages to serve the right number of people + some margin.

It saddens me that such cool/convenient things have been possible for years but that we have no interest in pursuing them since we're all in competition with each other to try to become billionaires. And the real billionaires aren't really interested in making less money.

Bus stops here: Shanghai lets riders design their own routes

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