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Bus stops here: Shanghai lets riders design their own routes
- xnx 1y agoScale down the number of seats one notch, and increase the flexibility fully and you've got self-driving vans.
- eulgro 1y agoWhy would you want such a thing?
- ketzo 1y agoThis 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 1y agoIt sounds great, but if this idea is a result of cost-cutting then it might not be so great in reality.
- MarceliusK 1y agoIn 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.
- bluGill 1y agoIf 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.
- ketzo 1y agoWell, 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)
- bluGill 1y agoEither transit studies should not be so lengthy and there are plenty of know ways to gather data that are less biases; or there is good reason for the length. Note that the above is not an exclusive or - there is a time and place for short studies and a time for long studies. However either way the study needs to be carefully designed to not get biased data, and this app is biased data.
- aeblyve 1y agoThe 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_ 1y agoA 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-smartbus 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 https://citymapper.com/smartbus returns a 404.
- softgrow 1y agoI'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 1y agoThe 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 1y agoLaw 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
- mulmen 1y agoFines are a disincentive. If they work what happens to your funding?
- lan321 1y agoTBH 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..
- parpfish 1y agoTangent: 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 1y agosurely then the census tracts would just become the new thing to gerrymander
- abdullahkhalids 1y agoGerrymandering 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.
- parpfish 1y agoI agree that ftpt sucks, but there’s still a need to determine boundaries for various administrative district to handle geographically dependent issues.
- abdullahkhalids 1y agoMy country has a psuedo algorithm in law that guides how to draw these boundaries. It basically forces each constituency to be convex. There is still some freedom in the process, and there is still some gerrymandering, but harder than in some other countries.
- kr2 1y agoChiming 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 1y agoSeems like the form of government doesn't really matter, you can find examples from literally any end of the spectrum of better public infrastructure
- petesergeant 1y agoSuffrage 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 1y agoThank gawd for self driving cars…
- sidibe 1y agoI 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.
- riffraff 1y agoWhen 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.
- informal007 1y agoThis remind me that road router should be walked by passenger rather than designed by designers.
- ars 1y agoLike this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path
- zaptheimpaler 1y agoChina 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.
- petesergeant 1y 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_man 1y agoExcuse 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.
- petesergeant 1y agoThere’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.
- rrr_oh_man 1y ago
- comrade1234 1y agoTrain/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_man 1y agoI love the Swiss approach to things. Possibly the only sane country.
- chrisandchris 1y agoRoutes actually don't change that much, is mostly the schedule. The article however is more about the route and less about the schedule.
- MarceliusK 1y agoCombining both could be powerful
- yanhangyhy 1y agothis is great. hope beijing will adopted this soon
- philberto 1y agoThe 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/ https://www.hvv-switch.de/en/faq/what-are-virtual-stops/
- dgellow 1y agoI was going to say this! Moia is pretty awesome
- mattlondon 1y agoWhat 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 1y agoWhat routes are those? I thought you can only be picked up/dropped off at designated stops
- tonyedgecombe 1y agoThe route through my village is hail and ride although most of the bus drivers seem to disagree.
- calcifer 1y agoMany routes have "hail and ride sections" without designated stops. You can't get off, but can hail and get on at any point. Here's a list for London [1]. [1] https://bus-routes-in-london.fandom.com/wiki/Hail_and_Ride_bus_routes https://bus-routes-in-london.fandom.com/wiki/Hail_and_Ride_b...
- mattlondon 1y ago
- jillesvangurp 1y agoI 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.
- throw310822 1y agoIn 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-sre 1y agoI'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.
- throw310822 1y agoI'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.
- grumpy-de-sre 1y ago
- Klaus_ 1y ago[dead]
- PicassoCTs 1y agoBusses 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 1y agoThis 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 1y agoYeah, 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.
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- dluan 1y agoLast 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 1y agoHow 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?
- aembleton 1y agoYou 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 1y agoHere 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 1y agoIn 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 1y agotake 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.
- charlieyu1 1y agoSounds 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
- tsukikage 1y agoHow does that work out for someone in the unpopular destination who wants to leave?
- charlieyu1 1y agoThere 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
- tsukikage 1y agoNo, 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?
- charlieyu1 1y agoWell, you take other transports. Or call the minibus company and sometimes they’ll arrange for you. Hong Kong is a bit unique though, that most people go to one or two areas for work, so the minibus is probably already full at C in the morning anyway
- sexy_seedbox 1y agoRed minibuses to be more specific.
- Elaris 1y ago[dead]
- debuggerson 1y ago[dead]
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- MarceliusK 1y agoThe fact that it can go from proposal to route-in-service in just a few days is impressive
- arjunchint 1y agoTaking 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 1y 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'.
- arjunchint 1y agoNo 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
- sidkhuntia 1y agoThis 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
- pas 1y agoThen votes should cost some money for the winners.
- Loughla 1y agoWhich would punish low income folks for no real reason.
- pas 1y agoHow? If you want to use the service you pay anyway, right? If you want a particular route you should have some stake in it. (Low-income / low-wealth / poor people ought to get vouchers and/or welfare payments - preferably as a gradual negative income tax.)
- hollerith 1y agoHow about we give the low income folks money every month rather than crippling the resource-allocation system everyone relies on?
- sidkhuntia 1y agoHow will that help ?
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- sidkhuntia 1y agoThat makes sense. If it has something similar to a subscription or pre-paid model, then the chances for these kinda scams would get low.
- originalvichy 1y agoSounds 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 1y agoEverything 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 1y agoOne 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.
- bluGill 1y agoPeople 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 1y agoGoogle 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 1y agoEvery 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 1y agoThis 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.
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- nitwit005 1y agoIt'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.
- schwartzworld 1y agoFunny 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 1y agoThis 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.