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.
This is really brilliant — like desire paths, but for transit. Obviously execution will be challenging, but the concept is fantastic, and China/Shanghai seems like one of the few places with the requisite density & state capacity to actually make this work.
Generally I think that the design of public spaces has SO MUCH room to be improved by just responding to the wisdom of the crowd.
Here in South Africa, we have "Taxis", which are individually owned (to a degree) minibuses crammed full of people. Routes are whatever maximises earning potential for the driver, so it is a kind of bottom up solution in a sense.
It is a violent cartel, so certainly not a good thing across the board, but it's just an interesting variant.
The moia service in Hamburg Germany offers virtual stops which is the next step I would argue. The bus follows a different route and stops every time based on the need of current passengers
Sounds like minibus in Hong Kong with extra steps - we have been doing this since eternity. Driver just ask where people would stop in advance, sometimes an entire area would be skipped if no one goes there
Train/bus services change every year here in Switzerland, but based on usage data rather than voting, which seems like it could be gamed.
Tangent:
I’ve often thought that it would be great to let people design their own political districts to reduce gerrymandering
At the polling place you’d get a map with your census tract and then be asked “which two or three adjacent tracts are most similar to your community”. Eventually you’d end up with some sort of gram matrix for tract-to-tract affinity, and then you could apply some algorithmic segmentation.
Two problems:
- this is far too complex for most voters to understand, much less trust, what’s happening
- the fact it’s “algorithmic” would give a sheen of pseudo objectivity, but the selection of the actual algorithm would still allow political infouence over boundaries
Chiming in from Los Angeles, USA to say wow, must be nice living in a modern society that prioritizes public transit and peoples' ease of movement. I know, I know, it comes with trade offs of living in an authoritarian state, but the absolute abysmal state of infrastructure in this country is maddening. Ever been on a train in Denmark or Japan or Switzerland?
I'm glad that Shanghai has moved to the next level in public transportation in meeting customer demand. Most cities don't have the funds to buy smallish buses and labour available as drivers. They don't have the money or willpower to get frequencies to turn up and go levels (ie frequent) and leave people with long walks to widely spaced routes.
Scale down the number of seats one notch, and increase the flexibility fully and you've got self-driving vans.
This kinda solution wont work in India. People will use relatives phones to vote for the route and get the route approved, but in reality there will be only one passenger
Taking this even further would be to autonomous dynamically rerouting minibuses:
- you have app, and you enter destination
- optimal minibus reroutes itself to pick you up and take you there with mix of walking, while dropping off other passengers too
- minimizes the door to door time that makes cars so optimal
Last year Shanghai celebrated the 100th anniversary of the bus system, so they decorated all of the bus liveries to be a modern take on the historical first busses. They are very cute and easy to use, and a lot of the bus stops have little old LCD displays showing how far away the next bus is.
How does this work in practice? Say someone wants to take a bus to the hospital. But not enough people want to go to the hospital. Will the bus not run and will you be shit out of luck?
take this only as a grain of salt.
It has been tried in many cities before like Beijing, Qingdao, Dalian, Hangzhou and Chengdu.
It wasn't a bad idea, it's just a good route gradually became a fixed route.
The fact that it can go from proposal to route-in-service in just a few days is impressive
This remind me that road router should be walked by passenger rather than designed by designers.
This has been tried in some European countries in the early 2000s, website not app.
People stop using it. Forget to cancel, unreliable service, took too long. As users drop wait times become longer, cascading failure.
Solution was real time dynamic rerouting and bus stop buttons to request the bus. But by then it was no longer wanted and canned.
this is great. hope beijing will adopted this soon
Busses need a rethink. There needs to a TGV like central hub and spoke fast travel version, with large capacity. And there needs to a a "on demand, collect people to the spoke" mini-bus service. And then there is no - as in "NOOO" option, for any local politician, to make the speed-bus stop at any location else, that is not directly on route and at least 5 kms apart. And the speed bus can not be allowed to be stuck in traffic, so obviously bus lanes it is.
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
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.