Bus stops here: Shanghai lets riders design their own routes

Hah, yeah I do really like Berlin, but traveling from Warsaw to Berlin does feel like going back in time, infrastructure and mentality wise.

Adding 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.

I 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.

In 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.

Transit 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.

Yes the policy quickly gathered enough public backlash and has been cancelled

Did Uber actually offer ride-sharing in these places? I feel like it’s just branding to avoid being called a taxi app. Only place I’ve seen ride-sharing in use was the US.

More 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.

The Roads and Transport Authority of Dubai is by far the best government authority I have ever interacted with, worldwide.

Once I had an issue with bus routes for my father's employees (similar problem, high density route with fewer routes). I put a request on their dashboard from abroad and within days, their reply came back with them confirming a trio of new buses to cater to that route.

Another time, I had an idea for bus route planning (not related to above, that relied on a simple ping system for bus driver notification). I sent an email describing the idea in short to the Emirati CEO of the bus authority, and within 15 minutes, he acknowledged my email and connected me with his advisor to set up a meeting the next day. The advisor (an Indian with a US PhD in urban transport systems) discussed my idea through over a meeting.

Oh, and there are self-driving bus demos currently happening in Abu Dhabi right now.

There’s no shortage of malls in UAE, but also there’s fantastic infrastructure — great roads, a metro system, a country-wide rail system (open for cargo, opening for passengers soon). As for “vanity projects”, the Palm and both Burj’s are commercial projects that are also highly successful tourist draws. I can see an argument that the Abu Dhabi branches of the Louvre and the Guggenheim could be seen that way, but I think it’s fairer to see them as cultural investments.

I guess I see the unfinished projects as being the proof: The World and the 2nd Palm haven’t been finished because they (I assume) stopped making commercial sense to the developers.

I would finally note that Dubai specifically has little oil and gas wealth. Maybe 1% directly and 10% that comes as subsidy from AD which has plenty. The rest is literally just a combination of smart and commercially savvy governance combined with an essentially unlimited amount of desert to build in.

I tried it out at the time. It was a minibus driving only me around for the price of a bit more than a bus fare.

I 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.

The most Western place I encountered this was West Belfast, twenty years ago. This was after the peace agreement but before public transport had been fully restored. So there were London-style black taxis in certain areas that operated on a shared fee basis; no meter, you'd get in and agree a price, and there might be other people in there going the same way.

Important to note that this was fully private and unregulated.

I'm not sure why the should "operate" anything. Any taxi or Uber driver could autonomously decide to put up a route sign and start following that route, with a standard ticket price that makes the service profitable.

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.

New York:

https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/interactive-new-...

My fairly rich French city operates minibuses, mostly aimed at old people, which run through the otherwise non-drivable city center. Of course these are short, low-throughput routes.

Visited Florence last year and certain bus lines there were operated by minibusses. I guess some routes with the narrow streets in the city center are impossible to drive with big vehicles.

Rich countries have both buses and taxis. These sit between the two in terms of both quality and price. I don't think it's a cost issue but a licensing one.

Hong Kong

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

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.

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.

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.

This is usually done with WiFi MAC addresses. I know that London did this for tube journeys but I'm not sure anybody's done it for busses. You can also use smart card IDs if there is an RFID payment system.

The introduction of randomised MACs might have put an end to it.

> This is really a bad idea. I absolutely do not want to explain where I am going anytime I get on a bus or train.

So don't. But I want to have the ability to enter where I'm going and get the benefits of better service it could bring. I'm in London - I just tap in with a contactless card, but I'd very happily open an app and pick a destination if it meant I was guaranteed a timely pickup, especially for less well served routes.

I'm all for still letting people get on without indicating a journey; you'd just lose out on the benefits.

> And you don't need 'there'll be a pickup within X minutes' because regular bus stops in a developed country already tell you all the buses that will come when. Some like 'Line 1, 2 min', 'Line 9, 5min' and so on.

I do need that, because buses are regularly delayed, over full and skipping stops. Knowing what the current estimate is doesn't solve the problem.

This has been my experience in at least a dozen countries over the years. You can solve that with over-capacity, but it's incredibly expensive to do so and so won't happen most places. Being able to fix that problem at a fraction of the cost has clear benefits.

> And for your end to end journey, you can simply open the app and look up your whole journey when you are planning it. If you really don't want to wait a few minutes, you can get there on time.

I could. But my experience would be vastly better, if, when I've already looked up the journey, and pressed "go", like I often do with Citymapper for an unfamiliar route, I had a maximum wait for each of those routes.

Not least because if you do this, you could run routes with more dynamic schedule based on demand, and account for unexpected spikes.

> That's a solved problem with 'request stop'.

No, it is not. That tells you when to stop as long as you follow the regular route. If you have information on who is going where, you can dynamically change the routes.

E.g. a route near where I worked often had a very overcrowded leg between two stations. It'd often have served more passengers better to turn some of the buses around at either of those two stations. If you had better data on who were going where and how many people were waiting at other stations, that decision could be taken dynamically, and cars brought in to "mop up" to prevent any passengers from being stranded.

Requesting a stop does nothing like that.

> In a city, you can run 15min frequency even on the routes that go into the rural area, and for anything else you can do more then every 15min. That fast enough that additional on demand pickup doesn't make much sense.

15 minutes frequency is shit. It's slow enough it will cause people to make alternate plans. The routes I would want this on had 8-10 minute pickups and we still regularly ordered ubers for journeys we could do on the bus. The problem isn't when the bus is on time - if I was guaranteed the bus would always show up exactly on time, and never be full, 15 minues would be somewhat tolerable, but the problem is when a delay happens, and the bus that finally arrives is too full to take on passengers.

> The most important point is, don't ask people for data just because you want data.

If you think it is "just because I want data" you didn't get the point.

I live on a greenway street in Portland (bikes are prioritized, car traffic is intentionally made difficult), but I would have no problem with a bus route down it. Having said that, I don't bike and I also don't care about Amazon trucks. I've lived in NYC, SF, BsAs, Madrid and Saigon. The performative hypocrisy of people in Portland who claim to want an equitable society and claim to care about the environment, whilst using those talking points to prevent any kind of urban growth or new housing, is shocking. The people who'd have a problem with a bus going down the street are the same ones who lobbied to turn it into a biking street and take away parking in the name of the people and the environment. It's all a lie. A thin cover for protecting their property values. AKA keeping the neighborhood white. There's no racism as safe as the racism you can explain away with progressive corporate-speak and some spandex bike tights.

Once you're paying the fixed monthly cost of a car (depreciation, maintenance, insurance) it rarely makes sense to use a bus. The exception is when there's insufficient parking at the destination but most cities have already decided not to go that route and it's too late to change it.

On the sidebar, probably more interesting than this dreary debate about busses, I noticed you altered your spelling to the generally accepted version. It made me look it up, and it was interesting because I've always spelt it with a double-S. According to MW:

>> The plural of bus is buses. A variant plural, busses, is also given in the dictionary, but has become so rare that it seems like an error to many people.

>> Nevertheless, buses is problematic: it looks like fuses, but doesn’t rhyme with it. Abuses doesn’t rhyme in two different possible ways: the noun with the \s\ sound or the verb with the \z\ sound. Words that do rhyme with bus are usually spelled with a double s, like fusses or trusses.

>> When the word bus was new, the two plurals were in competition, but buses overtook busses in frequency in the 1930s, and today is the overwhelming choice of writers and editors. Busses was the preferred form in Merriam-Webster dictionaries until 1961.

>> As for the verb bus—which may mean either "to transport someone in a bus" or "to remove dirty dishes from [as from a table]"—we do recognize bussed and bussing as variants.

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/plural-of-bus

But communism is busses.

So, some centrally planned systems are great and some are not. I would point out that the NYC subway system, which was the most extensive in the world after London's until fairly recently (when both were overtaken in length by a dozen systems in China), was largely built by private companies during its major growth phase prior to the 1940s. It has grown at a snail's pace ever since. The IRT, BRT, BMT, IND and ISS created much of the network as it is today [0]. This was at a time when there was both a lot of free market competition as well as increasing (but not insurmountable) regulation on what was permissible. To me, that is the ideal combination to generate growth and efficiency.

>> the two countries knows known for amazing train travel, Switzerland and Japan are very centralized in terms of planning

But these are democratic countries, both of which have a long heritage of private ownership of infrastructure, where people finally chose to allocate funding to unified government-run systems, and which take the oversight of those systems very seriously (and are among the most well-known countries in preventing corruption). In such a system, centralization is not enforced top-down, but rather bottom-up; the people are like shareholders. That is, if it works, acceptable as an alternative to a free market. By comparison, in a single-party state, using a government app to request where a bus system you have no control over might stop is only the most illusory kind of control over your surroundings.

>> There are some things the private market simply can't do when it comes to public transport, or at least not unless you want all city streets and traffic infrastructure to be privately owned as well. How that would look like in practice for a large city is speculation as it doesn't exist.

You make good points which explain how the private system externalizes costs, leading to a completely different kind of graft through regulatory capture by private enterprise. Trading the efficiency of a privately organized system for a bloated public system does still incur the same public costs and tolls on the commons, and still encourages corruption. Yes, private busses are a nuisance and an expense on public roads, and make everything more chaotic. (Full disclosure: I happen to prefer a bit of chaos in human affairs). Just to clarify, though: I'm not arguing in favor of a fully privatized road infrastructure to go along with the private busses. That would be as horrific as a totalitarian state's infrastructure. I'm also not arguing that we shouldn't pay taxes to the city or state to run busses alongside the private ones. What I would argue is that it should be left to the voters how much they'd prefer to allocate to maintain commonly shared infrastructure and services, as well as to elect (replaceable) officials to oversee those things.

Having the government be the only source of local mass transit is just as bad as having private companies own the roads. Neither public nor private sectors are immune to vice. Anything that has a monopoly on the market will act like a monopoly, with all the same inefficiencies and the same pressure on competition that's implied, whether it's the government or the local electric utility, the cable company or the only supermarket in town. The only way to deal with it is for the government to break it up. But the best way to ensure that the government will never break it up is for the government to own it.

FWIW, my perspective comes from growing up in a household of environmental and antitrust lawyers... I'm not especially anti-government, if the government is one I can have a hand in electing and the elected officials don't overuse their privileges. I see the dangers of both governments and markets having unchecked power as roughly equivalent to each other. In this case I'm talking about an unelected government. If you quiz me on what I think about Uber using regulatory capture to monopolize private transport by bribing city officials, I would express roughly the same set of views, and I'm glad when government can regulate the market. I just think its purpose is to regulate, rather than to replace.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interborough_Rapid_Transit_Com...

I think the comment you reply to perhaps fundamentally misunderstands the economics of public transport. You raise good points about the benefits of having central planning for these things, but IMO the most important factor the people often mis is: public transport is not meant to be a revenue generator.

Where almost all the efforts tend to collapse is the misguided and frankly idiotic notion that public transport should be directly self-funding or even profitable.

The benefits of a well functioning public transport - and Switzerland is definitely a great example - are huge, but indirect. It is a force multiplier, it makes the economy function much better by allowing people to get to where they need to be en-masse and efficiently. It multiplies the number of people that can get to the city center and shop there, and by making this journey fast, safe and reliable, people will be more inclined to do it and spend money there. The $1 that is spent on public transport comes back in multiples in terms of commerce that it enables.

Artificially crippling it by forcing it to generate revenue at the source will reduce these indirect benefits.

The tragedy is that the indirect benefits are more difficult to quantify, and often get ignored in the face of punchy public hysteria about how much money is "wasted" on public transport...

NB: I'm not saying that it should be a money sink, cost control is an important function in any organization. It's about the primary objective that public transport should fulfil.

Many 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_b...

The route through my village is hail and ride although most of the bus drivers seem to disagree.

No, I mean, what if there is someone at C that wants to catch a bus, but all the buses are skipping C because no-one already on the bus wanted to go there?

These incidents happen on a regular basis on public transit in California, and on that trip similar things happened to me a few other times. It's not comparable to European transit systems at all.

Authoritarian regimes traditionally touted public transit. From "he made the trains run on time", the German autobahn (which actually predated a certain party) to the lavish halls of the Soviet subway stations, to China's highspeed rail networks, public transit is just a thing that strongmen like to do. And absolute power certainly helps when you want to plow a road/rail/bridge through a neighborhood.

I watched an in-flight documentary about the architecture of soviet rural bus stops. Each one of them looked like it cost most than the neighborhoods they serviced.

You mean horizontal, at the bottom of the door. That one can be justified by ease of cleaning.

I mean vertical at the side of the door. You can literally make eye contact with the occupant as you walk by.

Maybe they're an immigrant?

When I took an operations research class our teacher mentioned they had done a study on Rome's traffic and the best solution (optimizing for travel time etc) was mini-buses (~20 people) serving shorter routes.

Alas, nothing came of that study, and traffic in Rome has not improved in the incurring ~30 years.

China is so much more modern, progressive, and advanced than Australia

How? 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.)