Bus stops here: Shanghai lets riders design their own routes

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.

It sounds great, but if this idea is a result of cost-cutting then it might not be so great in reality.

In a lot of places, even pilot programs get stuck in analysis paralysis. Public space design could benefit so much from this kind of feedback loop - more listening, less assuming.

If your transit operator is competent it is doing studies that look at more than just the people motivated to go through effort. They need to look for people who would use a route if it existed, but can't be bothered to open an app to ask for it - this is likely a much larger group than those who ask for something.

Well, certainly, a transit operator should be doing their own research — this isn’t a replacement for that.

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)

The masses are the real heroes, while we ourselves are often childish and ignorant, and without this understanding, it is impossible to acquire even the most rudimentary knowledge.

-- Mao Zedong

Either transit studies should not be so lengthy and there are plenty of know ways to gather data that are less biases; or there is good reason for the length. Note that the above is not an exclusive or - there is a time and place for short studies and a time for long studies. However either way the study needs to be carefully designed to not get biased data, and this app is biased data.

A few years back, Citymapper launched a bus line in london where the route was defined based on the amount of data they had about desired paths from their users that were badly covered by the existing network. https://citymapper.com/news/1800/introducing-the-citymapper-...

I didn't follow closely but it looks like the project got canceled, as https://citymapper.com/smartbus returns a 404.