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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 a

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.

throw310822 1y 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-sre 1y 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.
  - throw310822 1y ago
    I'm not sure why the should "operate" anything. Any taxi or Uber driver could autonomously decide to put up a route sign and start following that route, with a standard ticket price that makes the service profitable.
    - grumpy-de-sre 1y ago
      So the public transport authority stops running their own vehicles, and instead places tenders for individual routes? And anyone can bid on operating the route? I mean they already do that with subcontractors for contingencies etc. Overwhelmingly however it's cheaper to vertically integrate, and private operators have no interest in taking low profitability routes (which can often be very important due to second order effects). I will contend that automated busses might change things here a bit though.
      - throw310822 1y ago
        > So the public transport authority stops running their own vehicles, and instead places tenders for individual routes? And anyone can bid on operating the route? No. The public transport authority keeps doing exactly the same that it's doing now. Simply, taxi drivers can choose daily to start following a route for shared drives. Nothing else, except maybe some coordination so that the ticket price is known in advance.
        deleted 1y ago
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        pjerem 1y ago
        In my country, any city that is profitable enough for Uber&co also already have enough buses. When you already have a bus every 5 minutes, adding the capacity of some vans will not change anything. On a smaller bus line with less frequency than that, it will also not be really profitable for "independent" drivers. It may be useful as a temporary solution or a local test but a public transport authority (should) have enough data to scale lines or create routes based on real usage. When public transport are bad, it's rarelly due to the physcal constraints but always because budget is lacking. You aren't going to solve your lack of bus (drivers) by adding more vehicules with less capacity.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
    - 1y ago
  - bisRepetita 1y ago
    Hong Kong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_light_bus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_light_bus
  - vkou 1y ago
    Vancouver has 20-person minibuses serving suburban routes. They are what make the rest of the transit system work. I'm told (but have no idea of how true that is, since my social circles don't intersect it) that New York has a cottage industry of private bus-vans, that sit somewhere between a taxi and a vanpool that get people (usually working poor) to and from work.
    - grumpy-de-sre 1y ago
      From some googling it appears a major reason for the community shuttles is that they are allowed to operate on narrower, suburban streets than full sized busses and have lower fuel consumption per mile. I'll concede geography limits are a valid reason for smaller vehicles.
      - vkou 1y ago
        They also do less damage to roads. Large vehicles do disproportionately more damage. They are also cheaper to buy, clean, and maintain.
        grumpy-de-sre 1y ago
        Axle weight is a really good point tbh, if you don't have to pay labor costs for the driver it'd make a ton of sense to downsize. Ideally this would be accomplished with taxes on gross vehicle weight. Would make smaller vehicles inherently more economical. I'm not sure the cheaper argument actually works out in other areas though. If due to peak capacity requirements you have to buy and operate two minibuses vs one full sized bus then that one full sized bus is going to be cheaper to maintain/clean/etc. However if it's a low utilization route then for sure a minibus is a no brainer. Seems we see that model deployed in a lot of locations referenced above (excluding dollar vans etc, which I see more as a failure of the state tbh).
    - alwa 1y ago
      Dollar vans are real [0]. Real in the same sense as nutcrackers and bodega kitties: endemic, well-loved, and officially discouraged. [0] https://citylimits.org/how-nyc-dollar-vans-are-adapting-for-the-future/ https://citylimits.org/how-nyc-dollar-vans-are-adapting-for-...
  - yitianjian 1y ago
    New York: https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/interactive-new-yorks-shadow-transit-system https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/interactive-new-...
  - HPsquared 1y ago
    Rich countries have both buses and taxis. These sit between the two in terms of both quality and price. I don't think it's a cost issue but a licensing one.
  - ostacke 1y ago
    Visited Florence last year and certain bus lines there were operated by minibusses. I guess some routes with the narrow streets in the city center are impossible to drive with big vehicles.
  - pjc50 1y ago
    The most Western place I encountered this was West Belfast, twenty years ago. This was after the peace agreement but before public transport had been fully restored. So there were London-style black taxis in certain areas that operated on a shared fee basis; no meter, you'd get in and agree a price, and there might be other people in there going the same way. Important to note that this was fully private and unregulated.
    - htrp 1y ago
      gypsy cabs are also a negative externality particularly with unscrupulous actors
    - jazzyjackson 1y ago
      Petit cabs in Casablanca work this way, shared fee. I was only there for a few days so I couldn't make out how the metered fare was split fairly and didn't speak Arabic or French, so I usually just held out my hand full of coins and let the driver take what he wanted :^)
  - Bayart 1y ago
    My fairly rich French city operates minibuses, mostly aimed at old people, which run through the otherwise non-drivable city center. Of course these are short, low-throughput routes.
    - ghaff 1y ago
      There’s a regional transit system with smaller buses out where I live about 50 miles west of Boston. My empirical observation is it’s pretty just elderly who take them.
  - AStonesThrow 1y ago
    In Maricopa County, each city has discretion to operate a system of circulators or shuttles. Many of them do. Many of them are fare-free. For example, in Scottsdale there are old-timey "trolleys" which look like streetcars, but they are just buses with fancy chassis. They operate routes which go through some neighborhoods and commercial districts, such as Old Town, to get people shopping and gambling and attending events. In Tempe, there are "Orbit" buses which mostly drive through residential neighborhoods. They are mostly designed to get riders to-and-from standard bus routes and stations. You can also do plenty of shopping and sightseeing and day-drinking on these routes. In Downtown Phoenix there is a system of "DASH" buses which, among other things, have serviced the Capitol area, which is due west of the downtown hub, where buses fear to tread, because it is also the site of "The Zone" where the worst street people congregate and camp-out. Now all of these free circulators tend to be popular with the homeless, the poor, and freeloaders, but they are also appreciated by students and ordinary transit passengers, because we need to walk far less, and there are far more possibilities to connect from one route to another. An innovative feature of many circulators is the "flag stop zone". Rather than having appointed stops with shelters, signs or benches, you can signal the operator that you wish to board or disembark, anywhere in the zone. The operator will stop where it's safe. While it is still a fixed route, it gains some of the flexibility for the passengers to make the most convenient stops.
    - bluGill 1y ago
      Charge a small fee and those routes would be profitable on their own. You can of course add reduced/free fares for homeless/students if you wish, but most people can afford a fare and that money can go into running more service which the typical adult needs a lot more than the savings of a small fare.
      - AStonesThrow 1y ago
        Why be profitable? Charging fares on a free circulator is counterproductive. It costs to maintain and enforce fare boxes, and you’re adding friction to a system that’s designed to bring riders to the main routes. And you’re already running more service! The more successful circulators you have, the more passengers will be using the main system.
  - throwaway2037 1y ago
    Hongkong has an extensive mini-bus network -- the green tops (regularly scheduled and more tightly controlled) and the red tops (the wild west). Also, Tokyo runs mini-buses in the (richest) central core between areas that don't have connecting subways & trains.
    - thenthenthen 1y ago
      What is the difference between the red and green tops? In my experience the green ones are kinda wild as well, stop and go anywhere, super interesting. Too bad my Hongkongnese sucks. Edit: Bisrepita shared the info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_light_bus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_light_bus
      - throwaway2037 1y ago
        Hat tip to Bisrepita for the earlier share. In my experience, red tops can do almost anything they want -- they can deviate from the planned route in any way that they wish. Also, most only accept cash (is this changing?). Green tops are pretty strict about stops and accept cash or local metro card (Octopus). On a deeper, urban explorer level: The red tops have waaaaay more aggressive drivers. It feels like GTA sometimes. When riding a mini-bus, you only need two words of local language (Cantonese) to make it stop: 有落 jau5 lok6 ("yau-lok"). (You need to really shout to be heard over the revving engine.) For green top routes, use Google maps. They will guide you on what green top to take. Example: If you want to go hiking in Sai Kung, take the 101M green top mini-bus from Hang Hau metro station to Sai Kung pier. (Google maps can provide directions with the bus info.) Red tops are more adventurous and should only be taken if you speak/read more than a few words of Canto (50-100 words is fine).
  - rcbdev 1y ago
    Vienna's Nightlines (formerly ASTAX, now Rufbus) are partially like this.
- keiferski 1y ago
  Example of this in ex-Soviet countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka
  - Etheryte 1y ago
    I don't think marsa, as they're called where I'm from, are the same thing as described here. At least in my home country, they serve routes that don't get enough traffic for a large bus, so they have their own numbers and routes. Usually you would get one if you're going to a small village in the countryside or similar.
    - keiferski 1y ago
      Hmm; not sure then. I remember riding one of these in Odesa about a decade ago, from the airport to the city (presumably a route that would be busy enough to have a bus line.)
    - throw310822 1y ago
      Well I was indeed thinking of marshrutkas, at least as a saw and used them (many) years ago.
    - pydry 1y ago
      They operate in post-soviet cities too, especially between microdistricts.
- datameta 1y ago
  See: Маршрутка (Marshrutka), Colectivo, Matatu
notpushkin 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
  - vidarh 1y ago
    I think the cheapest and easiest starting point would be to offer people a time guarantee if they book, and contract with cab companies to provide capacity. E.g. a bus route near where I used to live was frequent enough that you'd usually want to rely on it, but sometimes buses would be full during rush hour. Buying extra buses and hiring more drivers to cover rush hour was prohibitively expensive, but renting cars to "mop up" when on occasion buses had to pass stops would cost a tiny fraction, and could sometimes even break even (e.g. 4 London bus tickets would covered the typical price for an Uber to the local station, where the bus usually emptied out quite well) Reliably being picked up in a most 10 minutes vs. sometimes having to wait for 20-30 makes a big difference.
vidarh 1y 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.
- HPsquared 1y 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.
  - lozenge 1y ago
    This is usually done with WiFi MAC addresses. I know that London did this for tube journeys but I'm not sure anybody's done it for busses. You can also use smart card IDs if there is an RFID payment system. The introduction of randomised MACs might have put an end to it.
- panick21_ 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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?
  - noduerme 1y ago
    I live on a greenway street in Portland (bikes are prioritized, car traffic is intentionally made difficult), but I would have no problem with a bus route down it. Having said that, I don't bike and I also don't care about Amazon trucks. I've lived in NYC, SF, BsAs, Madrid and Saigon. The performative hypocrisy of people in Portland who claim to want an equitable society and claim to care about the environment, whilst using those talking points to prevent any kind of urban growth or new housing, is shocking. The people who'd have a problem with a bus going down the street are the same ones who lobbied to turn it into a biking street and take away parking in the name of the people and the environment. It's all a lie. A thin cover for protecting their property values. AKA keeping the neighborhood white. There's no racism as safe as the racism you can explain away with progressive corporate-speak and some spandex bike tights.
    - selimthegrim 1y ago
      I fled Portland screaming to New Orleans over a decade ago and I haven’t regretted it for one moment.
      - noduerme 1y ago
        I tried NOLA for a few weeks in my 20s - loved it, got a job bussing tables at Brennans, moved into a house with some musicians, lost all $4k of my savings drinking and gambling, and called my sister for money to take a greyhound home. I really dig that town, and Portland blows, but I think it's one of the places I'd probably lose my shit in. Some places are just too easy to stay out all night in.. and have a kind of depressing spiral for a habitual drinker/gambler/sex addict. Vegas, Prague, and NOLA are the three that I can think of where I go to the dark places, go broke and get suicidal. Also, not ironically, my favorite places in the world. But I learned that I need to have a ticket out.
noduerme 1y ago
[flagged]
- panick21_ 1y ago
  Quite the perspective. I'm not unsympathetic to the idea of private owned and operated public transport. And those kind of system do sometimes produce some good effects. But they are nowhere near as good and advanced as some of the more managed ones. And even in those countries you mentioned, they are only part of the solution. There are some things the private market simply can't do when it comes to public transport, or at least not unless you want all city streets and traffic infrastructure to be privately owned as well. How that would look like in practice for a large city is speculation as it doesn't exist. To have a real efficient public transport system, you need lots of things. Large investment for things like tunnels and underground stations. After a certain size city, you basically need that. Also private buses can't reserve bus lanes and are thus often stuck in private traffic, resulting in very low speed. The same goes for things like signal priority. Safe dropoffs and so on. Many of those private systems used many very unsafe practices, caused lots of accidents and many other issues. Like just stopping everywhere and anywhere to drop people of on the streets. Its certainty not as glorious as you make it out to be. And there are many other problems with those system. They work for locals who are used to them, but often they are very hard to understand for anybody not local. And often they are absolutely terrible for people who are not your typical traveler, like people in wheelchairs, white children or other issues. So its a position of privilege to say 'just walk out onto the 4-lane road, hail down a private bus and jump into it quickly'. These system also didn't have centralized pay management systems with integrated fairs for different transit modes. That's hugely inefficient. > Centralized systems are sluggish dinosaurs. They are inevitably both corrupt and unresponsive. Funny, the two countries knows known for amazing train travel, Switzerland and Japan are very centralized in terms of planning, even when in Japan operations are partly private. And in terms of many of the things mentioned above, more centralization has improved things. I do not believe buses and trains across Switzerland would be as reliable predictable to every village above 50 people in all the mountains. Even in some Latin American countries, introduction of BRT style systems has increased rideship and speed. Introduction of those system were very mostly successful. And of course the US, that partially has functioning public transport has not produced such an amazing public transit systems. That's partly because of regulation but its also because of large issues around land use and primacy of the car in transport planning. > population playing Uber with its busses There is good reason most bus system aren't operated like Uber. Maybe its an idea for some limited additional capacity but that's about it. Its a microoptimization. There is lots of research on public transport and startups like Uber claiming they can do everything better is simply nonsense. In fact, its corrupt politicians who often get lobbied into giving public money to 'fake innovative' startups like Uber instead of investing into public transit that is far more proven and provides far larger capacity. Go around the world, test all the public transport system in all cities, and tell me honestly that those that are centrally planned aren't better. Even in Latin America, Chile in the example I read, where the BRT introduction was mismanaged, most people ended up preferring it and the system has increased total usage.
MarceliusK 1y ago
It's like rethinking buses not as rigid lines, but as flexible, scalable logistics
- bluGill 1y 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.
deleted 1y ago
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lhamil64 1y 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 1y 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...
  - bluGill 1y ago
    No, it is an example of why the idea is bad and always will be. Experts in transit have written extensively about this. https://humantransit.org/category/microtransit https://humantransit.org/category/microtransit for example.
bluGill 1y 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 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.
ysavir 1y 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.
- dheera 1y 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.
  - ghaff 1y ago
    One challenge with the SMS thing is when I travel from US to Europe I fairly routinely get a local SIM and turn off my US number.
    - dheera 1y ago
      Yeah I absolutely hate the SMS thing. I usually use Google Fi for almost all international travel (free roaming almost everywhere) but I need an additional local SIM in China because most of the SMS confirmation apps there only support +86 numbers.
  - _lvbh 1y ago
    Mostly yes but, I spent ~2 months traveling in Chongqing in 2023, most of the time without a SIM. You can get into most public wifis with a bit of scanning and mac spoofing. All public transport still accepted cash (or transit card) and was extremely cheap. Even if some shops no longer accept cash, there will always be ones that do. Not planning on going back anytime soon but if I ever do, I would not be a fan of requiring internet to deal with public transport.
schainks 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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/ https://www.viainfo.net/link/

throw310822 1y 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-sre 1y 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.
- throw310822 1y ago
  I'm not sure why the should "operate" anything. Any taxi or Uber driver could autonomously decide to put up a route sign and start following that route, with a standard ticket price that makes the service profitable.
  - grumpy-de-sre 1y ago
    So the public transport authority stops running their own vehicles, and instead places tenders for individual routes? And anyone can bid on operating the route? I mean they already do that with subcontractors for contingencies etc. Overwhelmingly however it's cheaper to vertically integrate, and private operators have no interest in taking low profitability routes (which can often be very important due to second order effects). I will contend that automated busses might change things here a bit though.
    - throw310822 1y ago
      > So the public transport authority stops running their own vehicles, and instead places tenders for individual routes? And anyone can bid on operating the route? No. The public transport authority keeps doing exactly the same that it's doing now. Simply, taxi drivers can choose daily to start following a route for shared drives. Nothing else, except maybe some coordination so that the ticket price is known in advance.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - pjerem 1y ago
        In my country, any city that is profitable enough for Uber&co also already have enough buses. When you already have a bus every 5 minutes, adding the capacity of some vans will not change anything. On a smaller bus line with less frequency than that, it will also not be really profitable for "independent" drivers. It may be useful as a temporary solution or a local test but a public transport authority (should) have enough data to scale lines or create routes based on real usage. When public transport are bad, it's rarelly due to the physcal constraints but always because budget is lacking. You aren't going to solve your lack of bus (drivers) by adding more vehicules with less capacity.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - 1y ago
- bisRepetita 1y ago
  Hong Kong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_light_bus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_light_bus
- vkou 1y ago
  Vancouver has 20-person minibuses serving suburban routes. They are what make the rest of the transit system work. I'm told (but have no idea of how true that is, since my social circles don't intersect it) that New York has a cottage industry of private bus-vans, that sit somewhere between a taxi and a vanpool that get people (usually working poor) to and from work.
  - grumpy-de-sre 1y ago
    From some googling it appears a major reason for the community shuttles is that they are allowed to operate on narrower, suburban streets than full sized busses and have lower fuel consumption per mile. I'll concede geography limits are a valid reason for smaller vehicles.
    - vkou 1y ago
      They also do less damage to roads. Large vehicles do disproportionately more damage. They are also cheaper to buy, clean, and maintain.
      - grumpy-de-sre 1y ago
        Axle weight is a really good point tbh, if you don't have to pay labor costs for the driver it'd make a ton of sense to downsize. Ideally this would be accomplished with taxes on gross vehicle weight. Would make smaller vehicles inherently more economical. I'm not sure the cheaper argument actually works out in other areas though. If due to peak capacity requirements you have to buy and operate two minibuses vs one full sized bus then that one full sized bus is going to be cheaper to maintain/clean/etc. However if it's a low utilization route then for sure a minibus is a no brainer. Seems we see that model deployed in a lot of locations referenced above (excluding dollar vans etc, which I see more as a failure of the state tbh).
  - alwa 1y ago
    Dollar vans are real [0]. Real in the same sense as nutcrackers and bodega kitties: endemic, well-loved, and officially discouraged. [0] https://citylimits.org/how-nyc-dollar-vans-are-adapting-for-the-future/ https://citylimits.org/how-nyc-dollar-vans-are-adapting-for-...
- yitianjian 1y ago
  New York: https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/interactive-new-yorks-shadow-transit-system https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/interactive-new-...
- HPsquared 1y ago
  Rich countries have both buses and taxis. These sit between the two in terms of both quality and price. I don't think it's a cost issue but a licensing one.
- ostacke 1y ago
  Visited Florence last year and certain bus lines there were operated by minibusses. I guess some routes with the narrow streets in the city center are impossible to drive with big vehicles.
- pjc50 1y ago
  The most Western place I encountered this was West Belfast, twenty years ago. This was after the peace agreement but before public transport had been fully restored. So there were London-style black taxis in certain areas that operated on a shared fee basis; no meter, you'd get in and agree a price, and there might be other people in there going the same way. Important to note that this was fully private and unregulated.
  - htrp 1y ago
    gypsy cabs are also a negative externality particularly with unscrupulous actors
  - jazzyjackson 1y ago
    Petit cabs in Casablanca work this way, shared fee. I was only there for a few days so I couldn't make out how the metered fare was split fairly and didn't speak Arabic or French, so I usually just held out my hand full of coins and let the driver take what he wanted :^)
- Bayart 1y ago
  My fairly rich French city operates minibuses, mostly aimed at old people, which run through the otherwise non-drivable city center. Of course these are short, low-throughput routes.
  - ghaff 1y ago
    There’s a regional transit system with smaller buses out where I live about 50 miles west of Boston. My empirical observation is it’s pretty just elderly who take them.
- AStonesThrow 1y ago
  In Maricopa County, each city has discretion to operate a system of circulators or shuttles. Many of them do. Many of them are fare-free. For example, in Scottsdale there are old-timey "trolleys" which look like streetcars, but they are just buses with fancy chassis. They operate routes which go through some neighborhoods and commercial districts, such as Old Town, to get people shopping and gambling and attending events. In Tempe, there are "Orbit" buses which mostly drive through residential neighborhoods. They are mostly designed to get riders to-and-from standard bus routes and stations. You can also do plenty of shopping and sightseeing and day-drinking on these routes. In Downtown Phoenix there is a system of "DASH" buses which, among other things, have serviced the Capitol area, which is due west of the downtown hub, where buses fear to tread, because it is also the site of "The Zone" where the worst street people congregate and camp-out. Now all of these free circulators tend to be popular with the homeless, the poor, and freeloaders, but they are also appreciated by students and ordinary transit passengers, because we need to walk far less, and there are far more possibilities to connect from one route to another. An innovative feature of many circulators is the "flag stop zone". Rather than having appointed stops with shelters, signs or benches, you can signal the operator that you wish to board or disembark, anywhere in the zone. The operator will stop where it's safe. While it is still a fixed route, it gains some of the flexibility for the passengers to make the most convenient stops.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    Charge a small fee and those routes would be profitable on their own. You can of course add reduced/free fares for homeless/students if you wish, but most people can afford a fare and that money can go into running more service which the typical adult needs a lot more than the savings of a small fare.
    - AStonesThrow 1y ago
      Why be profitable? Charging fares on a free circulator is counterproductive. It costs to maintain and enforce fare boxes, and you’re adding friction to a system that’s designed to bring riders to the main routes. And you’re already running more service! The more successful circulators you have, the more passengers will be using the main system.
- throwaway2037 1y ago
  Hongkong has an extensive mini-bus network -- the green tops (regularly scheduled and more tightly controlled) and the red tops (the wild west). Also, Tokyo runs mini-buses in the (richest) central core between areas that don't have connecting subways & trains.
  - thenthenthen 1y ago
    What is the difference between the red and green tops? In my experience the green ones are kinda wild as well, stop and go anywhere, super interesting. Too bad my Hongkongnese sucks. Edit: Bisrepita shared the info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_light_bus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_light_bus
    - throwaway2037 1y ago
      Hat tip to Bisrepita for the earlier share. In my experience, red tops can do almost anything they want -- they can deviate from the planned route in any way that they wish. Also, most only accept cash (is this changing?). Green tops are pretty strict about stops and accept cash or local metro card (Octopus). On a deeper, urban explorer level: The red tops have waaaaay more aggressive drivers. It feels like GTA sometimes. When riding a mini-bus, you only need two words of local language (Cantonese) to make it stop: 有落 jau5 lok6 ("yau-lok"). (You need to really shout to be heard over the revving engine.) For green top routes, use Google maps. They will guide you on what green top to take. Example: If you want to go hiking in Sai Kung, take the 101M green top mini-bus from Hang Hau metro station to Sai Kung pier. (Google maps can provide directions with the bus info.) Red tops are more adventurous and should only be taken if you speak/read more than a few words of Canto (50-100 words is fine).
- rcbdev 1y ago
  Vienna's Nightlines (formerly ASTAX, now Rufbus) are partially like this.
keiferski 1y ago
Example of this in ex-Soviet countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka
- Etheryte 1y ago
  I don't think marsa, as they're called where I'm from, are the same thing as described here. At least in my home country, they serve routes that don't get enough traffic for a large bus, so they have their own numbers and routes. Usually you would get one if you're going to a small village in the countryside or similar.
  - keiferski 1y ago
    Hmm; not sure then. I remember riding one of these in Odesa about a decade ago, from the airport to the city (presumably a route that would be busy enough to have a bus line.)
  - throw310822 1y ago
    Well I was indeed thinking of marshrutkas, at least as a saw and used them (many) years ago.
  - pydry 1y ago
    They operate in post-soviet cities too, especially between microdistricts.
datameta 1y ago
See: Маршрутка (Marshrutka), Colectivo, Matatu

notpushkin 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
- vidarh 1y ago
  I think the cheapest and easiest starting point would be to offer people a time guarantee if they book, and contract with cab companies to provide capacity. E.g. a bus route near where I used to live was frequent enough that you'd usually want to rely on it, but sometimes buses would be full during rush hour. Buying extra buses and hiring more drivers to cover rush hour was prohibitively expensive, but renting cars to "mop up" when on occasion buses had to pass stops would cost a tiny fraction, and could sometimes even break even (e.g. 4 London bus tickets would covered the typical price for an Uber to the local station, where the bus usually emptied out quite well) Reliably being picked up in a most 10 minutes vs. sometimes having to wait for 20-30 makes a big difference.

vidarh 1y 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.

HPsquared 1y 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.
- lozenge 1y ago
  This is usually done with WiFi MAC addresses. I know that London did this for tube journeys but I'm not sure anybody's done it for busses. You can also use smart card IDs if there is an RFID payment system. The introduction of randomised MACs might have put an end to it.
panick21_ 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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?
- noduerme 1y ago
  I live on a greenway street in Portland (bikes are prioritized, car traffic is intentionally made difficult), but I would have no problem with a bus route down it. Having said that, I don't bike and I also don't care about Amazon trucks. I've lived in NYC, SF, BsAs, Madrid and Saigon. The performative hypocrisy of people in Portland who claim to want an equitable society and claim to care about the environment, whilst using those talking points to prevent any kind of urban growth or new housing, is shocking. The people who'd have a problem with a bus going down the street are the same ones who lobbied to turn it into a biking street and take away parking in the name of the people and the environment. It's all a lie. A thin cover for protecting their property values. AKA keeping the neighborhood white. There's no racism as safe as the racism you can explain away with progressive corporate-speak and some spandex bike tights.
  - selimthegrim 1y ago
    I fled Portland screaming to New Orleans over a decade ago and I haven’t regretted it for one moment.
    - noduerme 1y ago
      I tried NOLA for a few weeks in my 20s - loved it, got a job bussing tables at Brennans, moved into a house with some musicians, lost all $4k of my savings drinking and gambling, and called my sister for money to take a greyhound home. I really dig that town, and Portland blows, but I think it's one of the places I'd probably lose my shit in. Some places are just too easy to stay out all night in.. and have a kind of depressing spiral for a habitual drinker/gambler/sex addict. Vegas, Prague, and NOLA are the three that I can think of where I go to the dark places, go broke and get suicidal. Also, not ironically, my favorite places in the world. But I learned that I need to have a ticket out.

noduerme 1y ago

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panick21_ 1y ago
Quite the perspective. I'm not unsympathetic to the idea of private owned and operated public transport. And those kind of system do sometimes produce some good effects. But they are nowhere near as good and advanced as some of the more managed ones. And even in those countries you mentioned, they are only part of the solution. There are some things the private market simply can't do when it comes to public transport, or at least not unless you want all city streets and traffic infrastructure to be privately owned as well. How that would look like in practice for a large city is speculation as it doesn't exist. To have a real efficient public transport system, you need lots of things. Large investment for things like tunnels and underground stations. After a certain size city, you basically need that. Also private buses can't reserve bus lanes and are thus often stuck in private traffic, resulting in very low speed. The same goes for things like signal priority. Safe dropoffs and so on. Many of those private systems used many very unsafe practices, caused lots of accidents and many other issues. Like just stopping everywhere and anywhere to drop people of on the streets. Its certainty not as glorious as you make it out to be. And there are many other problems with those system. They work for locals who are used to them, but often they are very hard to understand for anybody not local. And often they are absolutely terrible for people who are not your typical traveler, like people in wheelchairs, white children or other issues. So its a position of privilege to say 'just walk out onto the 4-lane road, hail down a private bus and jump into it quickly'. These system also didn't have centralized pay management systems with integrated fairs for different transit modes. That's hugely inefficient. > Centralized systems are sluggish dinosaurs. They are inevitably both corrupt and unresponsive. Funny, the two countries knows known for amazing train travel, Switzerland and Japan are very centralized in terms of planning, even when in Japan operations are partly private. And in terms of many of the things mentioned above, more centralization has improved things. I do not believe buses and trains across Switzerland would be as reliable predictable to every village above 50 people in all the mountains. Even in some Latin American countries, introduction of BRT style systems has increased rideship and speed. Introduction of those system were very mostly successful. And of course the US, that partially has functioning public transport has not produced such an amazing public transit systems. That's partly because of regulation but its also because of large issues around land use and primacy of the car in transport planning. > population playing Uber with its busses There is good reason most bus system aren't operated like Uber. Maybe its an idea for some limited additional capacity but that's about it. Its a microoptimization. There is lots of research on public transport and startups like Uber claiming they can do everything better is simply nonsense. In fact, its corrupt politicians who often get lobbied into giving public money to 'fake innovative' startups like Uber instead of investing into public transit that is far more proven and provides far larger capacity. Go around the world, test all the public transport system in all cities, and tell me honestly that those that are centrally planned aren't better. Even in Latin America, Chile in the example I read, where the BRT introduction was mismanaged, most people ended up preferring it and the system has increased total usage.

MarceliusK 1y ago

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

bluGill 1y 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.

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lhamil64 1y 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 1y 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...
- bluGill 1y ago
  No, it is an example of why the idea is bad and always will be. Experts in transit have written extensively about this. https://humantransit.org/category/microtransit https://humantransit.org/category/microtransit for example.

bluGill 1y 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 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.

ysavir 1y 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.

dheera 1y 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.
- ghaff 1y ago
  One challenge with the SMS thing is when I travel from US to Europe I fairly routinely get a local SIM and turn off my US number.
  - dheera 1y ago
    Yeah I absolutely hate the SMS thing. I usually use Google Fi for almost all international travel (free roaming almost everywhere) but I need an additional local SIM in China because most of the SMS confirmation apps there only support +86 numbers.
- _lvbh 1y ago
  Mostly yes but, I spent ~2 months traveling in Chongqing in 2023, most of the time without a SIM. You can get into most public wifis with a bit of scanning and mac spoofing. All public transport still accepted cash (or transit card) and was extremely cheap. Even if some shops no longer accept cash, there will always be ones that do. Not planning on going back anytime soon but if I ever do, I would not be a fan of requiring internet to deal with public transport.

schainks 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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/ https://www.viainfo.net/link/