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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
by zaptheimpaler 1y 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.
- 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 agoThanks for the perspective!
- HPsquared 1y agoIt sounds a bit like Singapore.
- pama 1y agoExcept Singapore no longer has a large amount of jungle to build on.
- grumpy-de-sre 1y agoVery interesting talk about some of the challenges facing Singapore [1]. Does feel like the Singaporean economic miracle is under a lot of pressure. Demographics and retirement savings I guess being a big part of it. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTHDkLqmoVg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTHDkLqmoVg
- hshdhdhj4444 1y agoYes. And slaves. Lots and lots of modern day slaves.
- fakedang 1y agoThe 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.
- rrr_oh_man 1y agoOh wow, that's pretty mind blowing!!! Thanks for sharing
- mschuster91 1y ago> 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.
- pjc50 1y agoIt's amazing what you can do with unlimited oil money and no worker rights, yes.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- suddenlybananas 1y agoLot of slavery involved though.
- stackedinserter 1y ago"Slavery"
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- umbra07 1y agoWhat term would you rather use?
- stackedinserter 1y agoSurprise surprise, it's "employment".
- panick21_ 1y agoTheir 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 1y 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 1y agoSome Europian countries ban ride-sharing in their entire territories, not just airports. https://www.ncesc.com/which-european-countries-dont-have-uber https://www.ncesc.com/which-european-countries-dont-have-ube... So Shanghai seems indeed low-bureaucracy, in comparison.
- kskjfjfkdkska 1y agoDid 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.
- presentation 1y agoI used DiDi from Pudong to Hongqiao around 6 years ago. Was there a span in between where it was a no-go?
- fancl20 1y agoYes the policy quickly gathered enough public backlash and has been cancelled
- keiferski 1y agoCheck 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Kn2tL51bBs&t=8s
- grumpy-de-sre 1y agoWarsaw really is booming, visiting from Berlin feels like stepping ten years into the future. Lots of real (and not paper) economic growth.
- keiferski 1y agoHah, yeah I do really like Berlin, but traveling from Warsaw to Berlin does feel like going back in time, infrastructure and mentality wise.
- grumpy-de-sre 1y agoI 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.
- unwind 1y agoObWikipedia: pączi are a Polish filled doughnut [1] that seems awesome. Thanks. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%85czki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%85czki
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- dgellow 1y 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 1y agoMight be USian bias. I've seen bus routes change in the US but not to the degree of adding massive amounts of service.
- bluGill 1y agoAdding massive amounts of service costs a lot of money. It is always a bad thing if you see that anywhere in the world. It takes years for people to adjust their lives around better service, so your experiment will have data proving it was a wasted investment long before it works. If your city happens to do a massive investment despite my strong recommendation against it look close at the funding - if they don't have committed funding to continue that service for 10 years just ignore it as odds are too high they will cancel that service just as your start to rely on it and then you have to scramble to adjust your life (generally meaning buy a car - if you are car dependent you budget for the costs of a car, but if you normally use transit this is a sudden large expense that you probably can't handle). Adding more service is a good thing, but it needs to be done in a sustainable way so that people can rely on it long term. Sometimes cities will make massive changes to their network. By eliminating bad routes they can often find the money to fund good routes. This is a very different situation.
- rsynnott 1y ago> Adding massive amounts of service costs a lot of money. It is always a bad thing if you see that anywhere in the world. Dublin Bus has added massive amounts of service over the last decade, going from an incredibly deficient bus service to merely a bad bus service, and has in the course of this been able to significantly lower journey prices, due to increased usage. > It takes years for people to adjust their lives around better service I think this possibly _used_ to be the case, but the likes of Google Maps have changed that. You'll see bus routes introduced days ago with full buses, because people want to get to a place, they ask Google Maps, and it tells them. 30 years ago, people would take the bus routes they were used to, but today they will take the bus route their phone tells them to take, so introducing new services has become a lot easier. (This does sometimes have unintended consequences, when routes intended as low-volume feeders get identified by the apps as a shortcut and swamped.)
- DocTomoe 1y agoBerlin 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_ 1y agoPeople 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.
- bluGill 1y agoMore importantly, if the routes do not change often you can plan around them. If the routes change all the time you never know if you can use them today and so you soon give up even checking.
- gnopgnip 1y agoDollar 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 1y agoIn 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 1y agoCities in the UK are adding new bus routes all the time, why wouldn’t you be able to do that?
- 9283409232 1y agoPhiladelphia 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.
- rsynnott 1y ago> including a 9 PM transit curfew What the hell? That just seems bonkers. Here, the city council is berating the transport authority for slow rollout of 24 hour routes...
- amanaplanacanal 1y agoWhere I live, most routes don't run at all on Sundays or holidays, and even the days they do run it's only once an hour. I suspect these are typical US service levels.
- npodbielski 1y agoHow 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.
- HPsquared 1y agoThere are pros and cons to each system, of course. But I'd expect the looser system to produce more innovation.
- npodbielski 1y agoIn expense of peoples lives and well being. You can also say that Doctor Mengele helped to advance modern medicine and you would be right. Still this would be really inhumane view of the world.
- bluGill 1y agoTransit doesn't need innovation. we have been doing it for a long time. Iterate on what is know to work. Small change is generally best.
- HPsquared 1y agoTransit needs major innovation and overhaul if it's to gain any significant market share. For instance in the UK (in 2022), a whopping 6% of commuting trips were by bus and 9% were by rail. Even less for leisure: 3% of leisure trips are by bus, 3% by rail. That's terrible market share! Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/transport-statistics-great-britain-2022/transport-statistics-great-britain-2022-domestic-travel https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/transport-statistic...
- bluGill 1y agoInnovation is not needed. Overhaul is perhaps needed, but all the innovations needed to get high market share are already known in the world. Most of what is lacking is the money needed to run that service. That is not an innovation.
- MarceliusK 1y agoWould be nice to find a middle ground - fast action with public input, not instead of it
- panick21_ 1y agoWhat 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 1y agoChina 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.
- hshdhdhj4444 1y 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.
- codingdave 1y agoLast 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.
- bluGill 1y agoRoutes 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.
- nocoiner 1y agoI went down a rabbit hole a couple years back, and it blew my mind to learn that many modern bus routes just replicate streetcar service that was discontinued (and the tracks torn up) 70-80 years ago.
- bluGill 1y agoThat isn't a surprise as people build their life around what they can do. If can make a trip they will and so those routes tend to stay useful/busy. There are sometimes better routes we could use instead today, but often the existence of those routes 70 years ago set how the city grew and so those are still useful routes.
- rsynnott 1y 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- quasse 1y 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-windfall-april-ridership-surges-to-10-year-high/article_3689ec1a-0121-44c7-b871-067eb4ee301f.html https://www.channel3000.com/news/madison-metro-sees-brt-wind... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Rhodes-Conway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Rhodes-Conway
- hayst4ck 1y 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_dreamer 1y 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.