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.
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
Or maybe not-but we’d have much safer traffic! Thus enabling revenue from fewer deaths.
But I digress- the problem with “revenue” for cities is they actively avoid getting it. If they actually wanted or desired more funds for the city, simply enforcing laws is all that is needed. It’s just not desired to have revenue I suppose, if it means enforcing laws and collecting dues owed.
Yes yes I’m probably being “unrealistic” but honestly? Maybe not.
Instead of your quite complex idea of segmentation, entities should simply move to a slightly more complex election system than FPTP, but which has reduced incentive for gerrymandering. For example, systems that give parties some seats based on the percentage of votes they get in the whole country/province etc.
That does not mean law enforcement is bad or unnecessary. It just means that law enforcements primary purpose should be to keep people safe and educate, not to fund the districts
Habibi, come to the UAE or Qatar
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.
Alas, nothing came of that study, and traffic in Rome has not improved in the incurring ~30 years.
One method would be to decide the capitals of the new provinces, and then ask people in each district which province they would most like to join. If there is contiguous land to the winning provincial capital for every district, then the solution just pops out.
People will say stupid stuff like "oh it’s because we pay for their defense", or "oh it’s because we have freedom", or "but but this would never work here, because we’re really different than anyone else".
But actually? It’s because we’re used to this shit and change makes us uncomfortable. We also really only care about ourselves, not our broader community.
Have you ever wondered why we have vertical gaps in public bathroom stalls? Inertia. There’s no reason to have them, but nobody cares enough to improve it. A better design isn’t more expensive or more difficult, we just don’t want it enough to make it happen.
We’re stuck in a local maximum.
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.
>authoritarian state
China has high speed rail. When you enter the train station security checks your national ID then screens your person and belongings. Buying a ticket requires scanning ID. Going from the station down to the platform requires scanning ID. On the train sometimes police come aboard and check everyone’s ID. When you get off the train you have to scan ID. Riding the bus or subway was one of the very few things that does not require scanning national ID or registering an account linked to national ID. However if you ride a bus into Beijing there are checkpoints requiring everyone to get off, get searched and show ID.
From someone who uses quotes „like this”?
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.
From gerrymandering to gentrifying in one easy step ;)
There are good reasons to force some mixing or suddenly your area only caters to the rich people while the non-similar area is known for making all the hard decisions for all the problems.
A lot of western governments are rather weak, I swear baumols cost disease and spiraling social/retirement/debt spending has crippled their ability to provide for the public.
It is such a tiresome trope, with people gushing over cars. We do not live in 1950 anymore.
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.
Good overview of the system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Kn2tL51bBs&t=8s
Lots of real (and not paper) economic growth.
In the UK/London there are some bus routes where you just stick your arm out and the bus will stop to get you where you stand ("hail and ride") and equally you can just ring a bell when onboard and the driver stops as soon as there is somewhere convenient to let you off. The route is fixed though.
Is it that sort of thing?
It wasn't because of the bus itself, or the routes, or anything like that. But because the willingness of people to tolerate one passenger screaming, threatening others, refusing to move for a handicapped woman, etc.
American public transit is a cultural problem, not an infrastructure one.
I despise this, not because I’m worried about the government but because it makes me feel restrained to act in a specific manner because this is not my space and I’m being watched. It’s dehumanizing.
In most of the Europe you feel like you own the place even if there are many rules. In Eastern Europe it’s even better, you feel free and nobody is watching you. The government and the wider system feels non-existent(which is the other end of the spectrum and can result in unmaintained infrastructure but it does have its charm).
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.
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.
It's also partly because they read The Population Bomb in the 70s and literally decided to ban housing/transit in order to stop people from having kids.
https://culture.pl/en/article/fat-thursday-polands-tastiest-...
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.
But it's true that public infrastructure is more dependent on local rather than federal governments. I think the best example of weak local governments has to be the UK [1].
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.
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.
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.
I guess this is what you call "ride sharing". It is like your parents picking you up from football and realizing the kid from the other part of the town also needs a ride so they make a huge detour
Don't get me wrong, I'd love for this to exist. Just, as someone with optimisation experience, it seems pretty gnarly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.ncesc.com/which-european-countries-dont-have-ube...
So Shanghai seems indeed low-bureaucracy, in comparison.
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, ..."
It is a violent cartel, so certainly not a good thing across the board, but it's just an interesting variant.
I'll concede geography limits are a valid reason for smaller vehicles.
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.
- 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
Important to note that this was fully private and unregulated.
It would be be rather far side for the bus to drop you off, let you walk, and then pick you up again 3 (european) streets over...in the name of 'efficiency'.
The introduction of randomised MACs might have put an end to it.
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.
Try visiting Switzerland, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and so on.
When rural trains in China run as well as Swiss trains, come back to me.
I'm not sure what came of it; but I guess it didn't get adopted by the TfL so it never really became part of the transport system of the city.
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.
Re-planning your network once a year is plenty.
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.
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.
>> 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 this view is much more prevalent in Europe. As absurd as Elon Musk's little tunnel under Las Vegas was, at the time, the American view was wild enthusiasm that some private company was doing something profitable to improve our lousy transit system. That's how desperate people were at seeing the ballooning costs of never-ending high speed rail projects that never even broke ground.
Private transit was how the United States was built, all for profit, from the transcontinental railway up to and including the takeover and destruction of the city trolley lines by General Motors so they could put their busses on those rights-of-way. That was the point where it all went wrong, again, because a single conglomeration too large to fail managed to get the government to allow them to monopolize the market.
This is where a control economy and a monopolistic market economy meet in a horseshoe. Monopolistic or "late stage" capitalism is increasingly difficult to distinguish from a command economy. That doesn't mean that the center between them isn't a very productive place. Whether crucial services like health and transport and housing are 20% private like France or 80% private like the US, is a matter worth debate. What really matters is that there's valid competition and freedom in both government and markets.
Transport can always find ways to be both profitable and efficient, as long as there is sufficient competition. But under a monopoly (government or private) it winds up only being profitable or efficient.
[Side note] Speaking of externalizing costs, I probably wouldn't be the first to note the amount of human waste on railway tracks throughout Switzerland. Just sayin'.
I guess I’ll add an example. Let’s say the minibus mainly goes from A to B, but pass through C in the middle. Dropping people off at C is often a non-trivial task that may takes a couple of extra minutes so you need to tell the driver in advance
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
And slaves.
Lots and lots of modern day slaves.
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.
[1] https://bus-routes-in-london.fandom.com/wiki/Hail_and_Ride_b...
Where I think it is most in use as a separate program is picking up elderly people. Retirement homes have minubuses picking up people and driving them to centrew and back. The users don’t have to abide by a busier standard bus schedule and the bus is more accessible by the elderly.
Even in Lisbon, it seemed that public transit was a much bigger hassle, both in time and cost, than a ride-sharing app.
We had a family of 4. Fares are about €3-4 each so €12 per ride in one direction. Ride-shares were about €9. We also abused the intro ride-share offers by creating separate accounts and got that down to €4.50.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Indeed. It takes a pretty big bureaucracy to be able to ban the wikipedia. Oh, and ban gmail & all of google. And all news sites in general. Can customize your bus schedule though I guess.
I only use ride sharing for longer 30+ minute trips, and usually that is between 10 and 15 euros one direction.
There is nothing about an app that can give you that guarantee. If the system cannot run their current schedule on time data on who wants to go where won't help them. They need to fix their operations to run on time. If their buses are full they need more buses, if they are skipping stops it is obvious that more people want to ride than there is room for without data on who that person is.
Your transit operator already has all the data they need. You need to ask why they are not acting on that data. I don't know if it is incompetence (that would be my expected answer in the US), or they lack the money to run more service. However either way the data they need exists and more data won't help.
Now if the transit operator is competent and has money: more data can help inform what is the best change of all options - but there are better ways to get that data than an app. An app is always limited to those who choose to install and use it (these days phones shut off installed apps that are not in use so you don't get data)
Flexible routes remove the mass from mass transit.
I suspect the majority of you will be finding a dictionary to look up "buss" since this is the first time you ever heard of that word.
But this is excellent as a complementary new piece of data, especially one that can be gathered so frequently and easily (especially compared to lengthy transit studies)
Great if you can pull that off in your city, but I'm not confident you can. For that matter if you can pull it off it means you are lacking smaller investments many years before that would have resulted in some transport that you could have grown over time to what you are finally getting.
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-statistic...
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.
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.
[0] https://citylimits.org/how-nyc-dollar-vans-are-adapting-for-...
Most of what is lacking is the money needed to run that service. That is not an innovation.
For good or ill, most teens do have a smartphone on them, and even kids are often seen with smartwatches that have tracking, and probably WeChat, and every mall I've been to sells them. On the Shanghai bus and metro, people often use a Shanghai public transport card to pay, they do accept old fashioned cash though too. Powerbank rental networks are common on the street and non-returns default to purchases (~$14–$28 USD). Malls, and the Metro often has power available for free.
Edit: Bisrepita shared the info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_light_bus
From the other perspective, a solid mass transit system significantly reduces the need for roads. It's likely cheaper for a city to expand its road capacity by adding buses than by adding lanes.
I didn't follow closely but it looks like the project got canceled, as https://citymapper.com/smartbus returns a 404.
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).
In many cities, the exact opposite of that has been true in my experience. I’ve waited at bus/train stops only for it to be 20+ min late or never show up multiple times per week. The unpredictability makes it infeasible as a means of transportation to getting to work or anything time sensitive (e.g., sporting event or show downtown). This is a much bigger problem in smaller cities with rudimentary public transit, but I’ve also experienced it in larger cities like Philadelphia.
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-wind...
I feel very strongly that if a teenager is old and responsible enough to take the bus on their own, they are old and responsible enough for a smartphone. Furthermore, it's actively harmful to send your kids out into the world without the kinds of modern tools that would make them safer and more independent.
As for "phone died," well... just find a place to recharge it. It's not particularly difficult these days and I can't actually remember the last time my phone died on me when I needed it.
OP is a really cool demonstration of what we can do when everyone carries a computer in their pocket. Uber in the US has something similar with airport shuttles. Why should we handicap new, shiny things to make them usable without a phone?
And why should the bus driver care about this? You can get off the bus if it doesn't suit you.
(a) Not everyone has a (smart) phone.
(b) Not everyone can use a (smart) phone.
(c) Not everyone wants a phone.
(d) Not everyone can afford a phone.
(e) Not everyone wants to upgrade their phone to use the newest shiny things.
(f) Not everyone can upgrade their phone (see (d)).
(g) Not everyone opts to put (third-party) apps on their smart phone.
(h) Not all apps are built with accessibility in mind (see (b)).
(i) Some folks are concerned about mass surveillance (see (g)).
(j) Sometimes phones get stolen.
(k) Sometimes phones get broken.
(l) Sometimes phones get bricked.
(m) Sometimes phones get hacked.
(n) Sometimes phone get locked out.
(o) Sometimes apps stop working.
(p) Sometimes cell service goes offline (see Hurricane Helene).
Great? I'm from Brazil, it's not great. They supplied a demand where the state failed to do so but the service was far from acceptable. In large cities these private transportations existed in a legal gray area and had to be pried away from organized crime at great cost. In the day-to-day they all physically fought each other for passengers, went over the speed limit to reach them before city buses and made up their own routes.
It was closer to anarchy than "great". Thankfully they're much rarer or non-existant now and the bus infrastructure in most cities is saner than in the 90s.
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-08-31/why-is-am...
Firstly, more people riding circulators equals more stimulation of the economy, via shopping and event-going. People getting out of their homes and out of their residential neighborhoods is an overall good for commerce.
Secondly, I believe that one of the issues for collecting fares is the reluctance to create a new tier. Because the circulators are not full-size, full-service bus routes, they would necessarily need to charge less fare, and setting that up and maintaining a lower fare tier is labor-intensive, and requires a lot of education of the public. If a bus runs around the neighborhood with EXACT FARE REQUIRED and people are out of quarters, well they're just going to forgo riding that bus. If a bus is fare-free, and gets them into the full-fare zone, they're going to go for it.
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.
One of the most important principles of a public transport system should be that it's accessible to all in a lowest-common-denominator sort of way. Anything beyond that is also good to have, but if you don't have that basic level of accessibility, then it's not really a public transport system, it's a luxury transport system. And there are already plenty of luxury transport systems around.
Also, my last phone died on me fairly often, I don't think it's nearly as unusual as event as you're making it out to be.
Interesting. I think there's a balance to be had here. Making our kids "too safe" I think may lead to a lack of resilience. I'll certainly be teaching my kid how to read a map (orienteering), and I suspect the sense of autonomy and self-reliance they'll get from knowing they can get from A to B without needing GPS will be a very good thing.
That said, we probably will get them a dumbphone to put in the bottom of their bag for if they really get stuck. I have no plan to have tracking etc. though. No way.
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.
(c) I own a cell phone, but NEVER leave the house with it (effectively a landline, but less expensive). When my city recently began requiring an app for public street parking, I simply stopped paying for parking (it's only a $16 fine, unless you are handicapped == free).
(e) The only thing that causes me to update my phone is when the battery swells up (typically around eight years). Otherwise I don't even update the original OS.
(g) Flat out, I refuse to use your app
(i) Whether by business/marketing or governments, agreed
These are incredibly user unfriendly locked gardens that are often adding gatekeeping to services that used to be ubiquitiously available, even in non-totalitarian systems, because suddenly you might need a bank account, an address, a government issued ID, a SIM card and a $100+ device that runs the approved stack just to take the bus.
People will log into vote on their route when they want one, and then have essentially no reason to ever access the feature ever again. With no active users, there will be no way to get "votes" for a route.
You request on app, and it sends you to a more central pickup/dropoff points
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.
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.
In China, Korea and other places, a smartphone is already the required entrance ticket to public life.
It's a little bit like faulting sidewalks for assuming footwear.
I once asked an in-law what happens if your phone completely runs out of food and you're hungry. He (jokingly) replied "no phone, no eat".
and? the Chinese people live and believe it. propaganda can be true, and governments can in fact live up to their statements. ofc with westerners' pathological mistrust of authority, as well as their penchant to pick the worst possible leaders, we will never come to any agreement about this.
also, are we seriously still unironically typing "guanxi" in this day and age? social capital is hardly something to be exoticized. keep the orientalist rhetoric where it belongs please.
I don't know where you get the idea that every single government program ever has to work for everyone - that's clearly not true and many useful programs are supposed to only serve a majority of people. Sewers are a great example of this.
b: Then get someone nearby to help you, or improve phone accessibility.
c: Tough luck. You made your decision, now live with it.
d: I highly doubt this. Phones are basically free - and I'm not just talking about budget, cheap-o phones. You can find an iPhone X for $100! People literally give them away sometimes!
e: That's fine, the Uber app works on some pretty darn old phones.
f: See (e).
g: Installing a third-party app to use a third-party service is pretty uncontroversial.
h: The ADA requires this from transit providers. If you are so disabled that a phone or desktop or whatever can't be used, you probably are not making your own travel arrangements.
i: Then you should not be purchasing things online at all, or with a credit card.
j-n: So... you go a day or two without a phone, replace it, and then things work again.
o: Hopefully not if anyone is making money off them!
p: Would you call a taxi in a hurricane and be surprised when it doesn't reach you?
I realize that HN HATES the idea that things sometimes require phones. Unfortunately, sometimes things are only possible with phones for reasons that have almost nothing to do with profit.
If you choose to not have a phone, you can still take the bus. You can still call taxi dispatch on a landline. You just can't do this stuff conveniently, which seems like a fair tradeoff to me.
Is that is not true here? What you stated is true of all hierarchical systems. The criminalization of "driving while black" in practice is an example of who is doing the implementation effecting law in America, and that is just one example out of many. The current head of the OMB said he wants to put government workers in trauma so that they do not have the resources to regulate big oil, on video.
> worse than China in that respect.
We are already there.
> but your statement about China is straight from a CCP propaganda handbook.
It is my external assessment from my own observations including significant amounts of talking with Chinese citizens. If you think I am a CPC propagandist, you can check my comment history where I assert that Taiwan is its own country many many times, and I am quite critical of many things, but if you want to have reality based assessments, it's clear that China can build things while the west generally cannot and it's clear China was right about the GFW (which implies a whole bunch of things Americans generally aren't ready to confront), even if what is said about the GFW is almost word for word the same out of Chinese people's mouths and very clearly propaganda.
> That was a long time ago, and obviously those executives didn't have the necessary guanxi.
I can't argue with that assessment, but it is also tautologically true based on how you define gunaxi. Regardless, there were consequences, while there are a dearth of any consequences for anything of our rich class in the US. We even refer to this immunity to prosecution as "the corporate veil," which appears to be nearly impenetrable in the US. The only time it seems to be penetrable is when another person of the same class is damaged.
> Who gets accused and is found guilty of corruption in China depends very much on who is in power
My core point is that we can't seem to find anyone guilty here. There are no consequences for the rich in the west. In the US the law is used as a weapon to create order while maintaining power hierarchies and not a system of using the states power against the powerful to promote justice. When Hong Kong was re-colonized by the Chinese, it was rule Rule of Law and the rights associated with it that became the academic argument for why those in Hong Kong are justified to protest extradition, and while at the time I found those arguments quite compelling. The degradation of the west and clear decline of democracy has turned the issue from what was clearly black and white at the time, to something that is much more grey.
If I ask which country has more corruption, I don't think the answer is very clear anymore, and if law is supposed to address corruption particularly at the highest levels, then it seems clear our notion of law is weak.
You mention CPC propaganda, but what about our own propaganda? If you analyze while assuming our own propaganda is true, western ideas make a lot of sense, but if you analyze ground reality, reality seems to be conflicting strongly with our propaganda.
> 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.
And yet my understanding is most Chinese (greatly influenced by the perceptions of those I interact with) believe that there was a successful crackdown on rampant corruption coinciding with a cross society economic uplifting. China is now a technological power house, and their innovation engine is now very much competitive, if not exceeding, our own.
What if those people cleared out actually were corrupt? What if they were like republicans who argue that the government can't work, and that's why they should be in power/their crony friends should get all the contracts? What if those people are doing as much damage to society as possible in order to justify new leadership? That's what's happening in the US and has been happening for 50 years.
So what looks like a black and white power grab, once you put those ideas in American terms, is much much less black and white.
> That's one thing China gets right that the US is totally inept at because it's built on a car culture.
These topics are related. Car culture is a function of the car industry's capture of the US government. China, AFAIK, wants to imitate car culture in order to not appear poor, but whether car company concerns or national concerns come first and how that gets navigated is materially meaningful to public transportation. Public transportation means less car owners, less car infrastructure, etc. It is unchecked power in the US that prevents our own infrastructure investments, because making those investments means challenging those who currently enjoy nearly unchecked power.
I did also have this experience with the London underground during strikes, but it wasn't a surprise and we could still see when trains would arrive. So, much less unpredictable.
Also, can't the bus system have a kiosk/terminal at certain locations? Can't there be a coin/bill acceptor on each block's single parking meter (e.g. Austin, Texas / UT campus meters)?
Recently I became a plaintiff (first time, small claims, no big deal); I was surprised to see that only pro se litigants can file paperwork with the court (i.e. lawyers MUST use the e-file system).
I attended medical school for one year, right before ACA/eRecords became a requirement... and this always seemed so invasive (e.g. sensitive/VIP psych documentation, PP).
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).
There were price controls that destroyed their business. And that was before cars. And Manhatten is a bit of a special case.
I don't know enough about that history and how 'private' these were. And even if it was true back then, I'm not sure if it would have continue to be as good.
I'm not sure we could recreate that world today. But its a good point, it is possible to get such a system mostly privately.
If you have a good book about the details of that system I would be interested.
> But these are democratic countries, both of which have a long heritage of private ownership of infrastructure
Switzerland centralized railroad ownership 150 years ago. That much longer then it ever was private.
And its really only in the 80s when Bahn 2000 was created where Swiss railroads actually separated themselves from everybody else (this is when Switzerland pulled ahead in modal share). And that was very, very centrally planned. In fact, it was only possible because they system more focused on centralizing an appalling plans that used to be local.
Its hard to see how a private market could produce something like the Swiss rail system. Maybe it could happen, but I can't really see how, without turning into a large area monopoly, like US railraods.
> hat 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.
In my opinion a public system should run so cheaply that it would be impossible for a private operator to compete. Specially not if they are required to pay the same salary, follow the same safety practices and so on.
Its just hard to see how you could create 'fair' competition that also doesn't disrupt peoples lives.
How such a private and public system would work is a bit hard to really comprehend. Specially in a place like Switzerland.
I am not totally opposed to ideas like this, I just struggle with seen large advantages.
> In such a system, centralization is not enforced top-down, but rather bottom-up; the people are like shareholders.
Most western countries are democracies. And centralized system like China can also have good centralized systems.
I think the biggest issue are how allowed and preferred cars are. Even if you allowed private buses in the US, without changing regulation for cars, and land use, its not gone matter that much.
I am much more open to it in middle income democracies like Latin America.
> 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.
I think this is just not true, many things run perfectly well as monopoly. Like many water and utility systems all around the world.
Monopolies have some inherent efficiencies. Not having a monopoly ensures a very high cost by itself. Competition needs to overcome that cost. And I think its hard to prove that it does. The usual ways to get head in competition against the government is just to pay people less. There are just that many clear cost advantages you can get when running a bus privately.
There is some potential innovation in ticketing, but if you separate the ticking system, the complexity of that is rarely worth it.
For example in passenger railroads, I don't think the privatization and competition efforts have yielded all that much, and had negative effects as well. All that effort and cost could have been focused on better things.
But even there, things like the 'West Bahn' in Austria did actually improve the situation in lots of places (and one of the Bahn 2000 people from Switzerland was involved).
Competition in cargo railroads on public access track has worked pretty well, but its most often the cargo railroads from other monopolies that use it.
So I think this is still an unsettled field and I encourage experimentation. But systems that already run well like Switzerland, I wouldn't want to spend a decade interdicting some new experimental system to try new things in this regard.
This is only partly true. The transcontinental railroads got a huge amount from the government. Most specially land, and land that they didn't really even 'own'. It was the US military that made sure that land was available.
And the trolley bus lines were private, before cars this was better, but the right of way was not guaranteed. And once cars were allow the same rights, their business collapsed.
It wasn't really General Motors, that accounts for a very few lines, trolley lines on streets that allowed cars simply weren't possible anymore.
If those trolley lines had understood this problem they would have continued owning the land instead of selling all the land. That was their biggest mistake. But even then, most would have simply turned into real-estate companies, rather then to continue to run the trolley.
> What really matters is that there's valid competition and freedom in both government and markets.
> Transport can always find ways to be both profitable and efficient, as long as there is sufficient competition. But under a monopoly (government or private) it winds up only being profitable or efficient.
If you look at private US railroad history, there were many, many, very inefficient practices. In practice, individual railroad companies were just local monopolies. And those local monopolies did a very, very bad job working together.
> [Side note] Speaking of externalizing costs, I probably wouldn't be the first to note the amount of human waste on railway tracks throughout Switzerland. Just sayin'.
This is a problem that has been dealt long ago. No modern train have this anymore. Well to be more accurate, those trains still run sometimes, but the bathrooms are locked.
But the same happened everywhere on the world.
And its also makes more sense, specially in historical places. In Switzerland, the idea to move around political and voting districts dynamically would be deeply a-historical.
Its simply the case that if more people move to an area, that area gets more people that represent it in parliament.
But the US for various reasons, focused on single representative districts. Those are good for some things, but also cause many, many problems. The positives are that it makes it easier to campaign, because you ahve to convinced fewer people. And its proven to generate a diverse set of candidates (assuming no gerrymandering). But its also easier to gerrymander, and it doesn't necessarily give the best overall set of candidates for a large groups of people.
Modern research suggest that using a propitiation based multi representative district is a far better solution.
For a well researched system for that, I would suggest: https://www.starvoting.org/star-pr
So create a few big districts, then use a good voting system.
You can separate the political and the voting districts, at least when you are voting on higher levels.
Also there is a question if you want to expand the current system (ie more provinces), or if you want to add a new layer into the chain (ie sub-provinces). Both can be good depending on what you want to achieve.
Britain is currently introducing new layers. They have new district mayors for new major regions.
But Britain is quite strange in how their system works, mostly because they has not been a real revolution for 800 years.
How would federal voting work in your system? Are there any actual proposals? How would you form a parliament?
We spent 2.5trillion on the military last year. But the minute someone talks about putting money into things that benefit the general population it’s like “where’s the money for free healthcare come from, Bernie bro?” “Can’t give kids free lunch, they need skin in the game” “can’t have free education, something something bootstraps”
some of them do; the well educated ones don't.
> propaganda can be true
except that it's not
I lived in China for years and am pretty well versed in life there under Xi and how the "rule of law" actually works there.
> unironically typing "guanxi" in this day and age
I left China in 2017 so it's _possible_ that things have dramatically changed since then, but from all accounts it hasn't. So it's not ironic because everything still runs on guanxi rather than on the rule of law.
- yes, particularly under Trump the rule of law is being eroded; no question there. And there is systemic bias in the system here (i.e, driving while black, etc.) But it's not comparable with how the "rule of law" (which really should be called "rule by law") works in China. I know, I lived it for a number of years, owned a business there, was deeply immersed in the goings on, and many frank discussions with our circle of well educated Chinese (many of whom were emigrating or at least getting their kids out of the country).
> most Chinese (greatly influenced by the perceptions of those I interact with) believe that there was a successful crackdown on rampant corruption coinciding with a cross society economic uplifting.
Maybe the thinking has changed since I was there (left in 2017) but I can tell you without a doubt that the well educated class was not fooled by Xi's crackdown (which started a couple of years after he came into power). There's corruption everywhere--who got cracked down on (who certainly were corrupt) depended entirely on whose side they were own (much like Trump today). At the lower level, who gets the ax depends on the relationships they have with higher ups. Yes, in the US this happens to, but it's not at all the same level (until Trump--which is what's frightening about Trump).
Yes, the cross-society economic lift was real and greatly to China's credit. But that was not a result of some crackdown on corruption but rather a liberalization of the economy under Deng and continued by others especially Hu Jintao. I was there when Xi came into power and we all thought he was going to continue that, and instead after a couple of years it become clear he was going the opposite direction. That's when those who had the money and ability to leave started doing so, or putting together plan B's.
There is a faustian bargain whereby the middle class will support the government so long as there is economic growth (which is why the illusion of economic growth must be maintained). This is couple with extreme information controls and immediate crackdowns on any dissent, so that there is no opportunity to mount any resistance, and therefore "mei banfa", as the Chinese would say.
Now, people in the undeveloped areas correctly feel like they are not represented by their governments. Creating more provinces means more spread out development. It also prevents the largest province from bullying the federal government into complying to its whims.
There are already 1.5 administrative layers below provinces (thanks to Britain I might add), but they don't function well at all. But that discussion cannot fit into a HN comment.
The system you advocate sound really good in your head, because an unknown non-existing system that magically sends a car to any place in 5min anywhere and transports millions of people reliability just sounds fantastic.
You don't see how complex this system would be and how instantly hard this would be to implement, and even if somebody did, it would be more expensive and less efficient, and provide less service and less capacity.
Additionally, most of the problem you complain about, already have known good solutions that could be implemented at far lower cost. And those problems are 100x easier to solve then the new system you are proposing.
And what I really don't understand, is why do you think an bad public transit agency that is already bad at running simple buses, is going to do much better if they had to run a, much more complex highly dynamic system. That is just a contradiction. Just do a simple thing correctly first, follow best practices, and then you can experiment some more with experimental stuff.
> E.g. a route near where I worked often had a very overcrowded leg between two stations
So this is already statically known then ... and all the needed data already exists.
> 15 minutes frequency is shit.
That frequency reliable and coordinated with anything else is for low population areas. If you believe in those areas, a public transport agencies would have cars just ready to pick everybody up, you are fooling yourself. That is just the kind of magical thinking you are talking about.
And 15 minutes is perfectly fine for quite a lot of places, many things in Switzerland run at 15min intervals, and its plenty for many things as long as its coordinated with everything else.
> 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.
You are likely quite wealthy, because most normal people do not order uber if there is a bus in 8min, even if they are sometimes late or a bit to full for your taste. Because if everybody did what you suggested, uber would be oversubscribed and massive surge pricing would happen and most people wouldn't get an uber, and then only after quite some time.
Since you seem to live in London I would just point out that Britain has done pretty badly on transit. For mostly dumb, tourist, reasons they are sticking with double decker buses. These are exactly the wrong solution for most routes. Slow ingress and egress in double deckers increases dwell times, and that's a killer as it leads to bunching and station skipping.
London is far to big a city for these tiny buses on all but a few routes into the outskirts. What they should use modern trams or something like this:
https://www.bus-pics.com/pics/_data/i/upload/2020/06/23/2020...
This can transport 120+ people and much more if you really pack in people.
And lines where this is overkill or not possible because of other constraints, level boarding electric/hybrid bus with many doors and a single level are the right alternative.
These are just some of the many issues with how London runs its system that leads to some of those problems you describe. I'm not an expert on London, but I'm sure people have written about this.
I have lived in Zürich and Berlin, and I have only once in my live skipped a bus or tram because it was to full (because of a fire at the train station). And Zürich has a 96-98% on time rating for buses and trams, and even higher if you account for how often you make your connection, I have only once in my live take an uber in the city, and that was at 3am. And Zürich is still considered a quite car oriented city, and doesn't have a metro like London, where buses and trams often run in traffic and and there are far to fewer bus lanes then there should be. Even some roads that have 4 lanes and run many buses still allows car on all 4 lanes for some dumb reason. But you can plan a reliable network even with that.
For a good general article going over many of these topics, this is a nice one and has some good further links:
https://marcochitti.substack.com/p/getting-bus-priority-righ...
Switzerland where I live very much has this, with 26 top level provinces and only some 8 million there is and a crazy amount of localism, mostly only have 100k people. Each with their own school systems, their own tax polices and almost everything else too. That is of course because of a history of slowly growing together with many compromises (and a civil war thought about the issue of centralization in 1847).
Most former colonial powers preferred to set up provinces as that requires less people to administer and control, and nobody cares about the hinterlands anyway, as long as there weren't major resources there.
So I think this is a good policy. But system do need to be in place to make sure these areas work together on things like transport policy. This is still a major struggle here.
But in reality this would be used by 1 person. This route can then be cancelled if the service provider wants due to lower number of passenger(low cash flow).
The idea being that there is a gunaxi correlated "budget for corruption," but use of that budget comes with strings, and if corruption is engaged in, you are effectively signing a contract for results and that results forgives the corruption.
The mandarin first speaker who first said the idea didn't explain it exactly like that, but believed it completely and without question. The Cantonese first speaker who explained it more rigorously believed it in practice, but also that the corruption budget was far exceeding what was "planned" for creating crisis. Both asserted their own superiority to India, which also has a culture of corruption without a culture that demands results. Neither of them knew eachother.
Certainly when I heard that, my American ideological immune system was like "uh hu, that's certainly an interesting perspective." I was reminded of stories about how stringent military quartermasters are because it's understood that corruption is viral.
But it's hard to argue that China does not have results, long term thinking (kinda), and it appears to act on behalf of the public more.
Around the time of Hong Kong, I was fully on board with "Kantian universalize-able ideals restricting the actions of societies most rich and powerful" being a good definition for Rule of law, but since Trump round 2 in particular, I've come to analyze rule of law not by what it is, but what its outputs are supposed to be with the underlying assumption that any system that produces results must in some ways have structure that reflect Rule of Law.
Rule of law is when people, particularly leaders, subordinate to an idea/reality/reason rather than to a hierarchical structure/arbitrariness, so even if there is corruption consequences for failure and reward for success is rule of law-ish. I think that's even more visible when compared to the western standard of reward for failure and reward for success, more commonly stated as "rugged capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich" or "privatize profits and socialize risks."
> I know, I lived it for a number of years, owned a business there, was deeply immersed in the goings on, and many frank discussions with our circle of well educated Chinese (many of whom were emigrating or at least getting their kids out of the country).
How predictable/arbitrary would you say the operating environment was?
Predictability suggests rule of law, while arbitrariness strongly suggests none. I'm not sure I would buy IP related examples as related to rule of law, and I would also likely try to distinguish between a hyper competitive environment between unequally resourced people and arbitrary executions of power, which I don't quite think are the same.
> faustian bargain
Timothy Snyder is my favorite political thinker, he recently wrote "On Freedom" and talks about "freedom from" vs "freedom to" at length. Money in many ways is freedom. If you don't have money you are not very free. So China getting richer, while in America Wages are stagnant and losing buying power year over year has implications for overall freedom. In many ways China is becoming more free and America less free if you think about "freedom to" and "freedom from" holistically rather than just "freedom from" which is a very American way of thinking about freedom. Chinese policy becomes a lot more defensible in terms of "freedom to" while it is completely indefensible in terms of "freedom from."
Where once I saw authoritarianism in China, now I ask how much of their behavior is actually an answer to the Paradox of Intolerance and how true the argument of the greater needs for ensuring order in a society at that scale (which from what I can tell is definitely propaganda used to sell it internally). Don't get me wrong, I completely see china as an authoritarian state rife with unchecked (and therefore arbitrary) power, but China is also functional in a way the US is very much not and that's become very interesting to think about, for me.
I'm interested in your analysis of China from a "freedom to" perspective.
> no opportunity to mount any resistance, and therefore "mei banfa"
Timothy Snyder calls this "the politics of eternity."
> middle class will support the government
Given what you've said so far, what does it mean for the middle class to not support the government? Consent is the core primitive of western political ideology and foundational idea of 'rule of law,' so the implication of withdrawing consent is certainly interesting.
I don't believe in 'side-ism'. A crackdown on the GOP would be a benefit for the rule of law while it still being in a perilous position, while a crackdown on the DNC is very a much a prelude to destroy the idea of rule of law altogether.
Destroying the opposition isn't obviously bad. Referencing side-ism implies that removing all the nazis from your government is a bad thing because it gives non-nazis unchecked anti-nazi political power. I view that as a good thing if the definition of nazi reflects reality (like in germany) rather than unreality (like russia/urkaine).
It's bad. It's what turns a democracy into a dictatorship. And it's always for "good reasons" (by labeling the opposition as Nazi's/corrupt/criminals/etc.).
Now China was never a democracy, but the CCP was not monolithic and was somewhat democratic within the party itself -- except that is now gone.
There's no legal process, so the only option would be mass protests. Believe it or not, this does happen in China occasionally, but not in big cities like Beijing/Shanghai, and it's very quickly put down and not reported in the news (and social media reports are very quickly censored, though Chinese can find ways around this, often using very clever play-on-word techniques which the Chinese language is much better suited to than English; censors are on to it though so it's cat-and-mouse or whak-a-mole).
> I completely see china as an authoritarian state rife with unchecked (and therefore arbitrary) power, but China is also functional in a way the US is very much not and that's become very interesting to think about, for me.
I understand how that can seem appealing from a distance. Much like the way that people who don't live in the US look at it from a distance and think "land of opportunity" (which to be fair, for some people it has been). Live and work in China for years and you understand that the way it looks from the outside is not the way it is. China is no more functional than the US, and in fact, very much less so. The uncertainty created by the lack of a proper legal system is _not_ something you experience in the US. Case in point: We were pulled in by the police for failure to comply with some paperwork (paperwork that couldn't be complied with, a typical catch-22 situation in China that creates a grey zone in which businesses operate within the law but can at any moment also be considered in violation of the law if so deemed). Anything could have happened, from shutting us down completely, to a slap on the wrist. We were first told we had to shut down completely, but the higher up got a call from one of our well-connected Chinese friends and gave us a slap on the wrist instead (see how that works?). Except that the highest investigating officer said that he wanted to be a partner in our business and we ended up giving him 10% of the business to ensure that we didn't get pulled in again. Straight out of Don Corleone's playbook. This is quite common, and none of our Chinese friends were surprised (in fact, they advised us to go along with it, because it's just the way it goes (unless you have enough guanxi). For all its faults, this would not happen in the US (we'd sue).
This is just one example. But articles and books about China don't give you a proper idea of what things are like there because people visit for 3 months (or 3 weeks) and think they understand China. Or they spend 1-2 years there at a Chinese university, or living in an expat bubble, and think they know. Spend 6 years there embedded in Chinese society, and you'll quickly become disabused of your ideas about China.
I also pretty strongly disagree with your take on freedom. It's easy to say that because you don't live in an autocratic country, and neither has Snyder. I've spent years in two highly autocratic countries (China and Russia) and let me tell you, money itself is not freedom. What money does in those countries is buy you a ticket out.
After having lived on almost every continent in a range of countries under different governmental systems, I still agree with Churchill that Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
I find it amazing that people can be like "screw optimizing public services, saving the environment and make things more accessible for most people, I and some others don't like phones"
Sometimes the label matches. There have been 4 people in high GOP positions who have sieg heiled. They aren't being labeled Nazis, they are objectively and factually Nazis. Germany's crackdown on the AFD is a response to power seizures/white supremacy in America. The GOP strategy writers literally wrote "there will be a revolution and it will be bloodless if the left allows it to be." There has very much been a declaration of "us or them", and that's not the type of thing that can be tolerated. You can't say "yes we'll work together with people who have said it's us or them."
Likewise your argument becomes a defense for pervasive systemic corruption, because the defense is no longer "we aren't corrupt," but "they're attacking us because we're the opposition, this is a power grab."
The gridlock that is a direct result of lack of corruption enforcement "because that would be a political power grab" became the mandate to overthrow the old establishment/ignore the constitution. What is happening in America right now is most influenced of all people by Merrick Garland who failed to prosecute a criminal because he was worried about enforcing the law against politicians which turns the justice system into a political weapon.
Unfortunately a weapon is just a weapon, it is a completely amoral object that amplifies the morality of it's wielder. Police officers carry weapons. It is not the weapon or that a weapon was used, but what the weapon is used to achieve that is worth analyzing.
That's the problem with side-ism, it implies that there are two equal sides with equal legitimacy and equal ability with equal strategies.
Game theory is deeply relevant, because on the two ends of the political spectrum are the cooperators (liberals) and people who think they should defect if they are able to win by doing so (conservatives). Conservatives don't cooperate when they should, and liberals don't defect when they should, and that's how those ideologies largely fail. Conservatives end up power grabbing (which is what I believe you're largely speaking in reference to) and creating dictatorship, while liberals fail to power grab and create dictatorship by ceding power.
