Bus stops here: Shanghai lets riders design their own routes

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

surely then the census tracts would just become the new thing to gerrymander

Gerrymandering is much more favorable in a FPTP system of elections than other types of elections. Winner takes all really incentives doing whatever it takes to keep winning.

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.

Comment 2: I have actually had the same idea as you in a slightly different context. My country is in urgent need of creating new smaller provinces by dividing the existing ones. But there is wide disagreement on what the boundaries should be.

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.

I also wonder if it would be stable enough over time

> which two or three adjacent tracts are most similar to your community

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.

The problem is that constituency is about answering the question "who are my people?". Like, why don't we have an MP for tech workers and an MP for grandmothers? Why do constituencies need to be geographical?

So that your representative can address local issues like a hospital being closed or a new road being built.

I agree that ftpt sucks, but there’s still a need to determine boundaries for various administrative district to handle geographically dependent issues.

Borders should be simple - either natural geography (rivers) or squares that are some fixed increment of a km.

I care more about my demographic, my profession and role in society then I do about the local area I happen to live in right now. Geographic constituencies are a relic of the feudal past. Sure, local issues should be discussed at some point but it's really not a good way to represent the population and the actual range of viewpoints in society.

Well, the districts are already there and have been mostly unchanged for decades. There is a lot of administrative history tied into specific districts. So splitting a single district across two provinces will not do. So the new provincial borders have to across existing district boundaries.

My country has a psuedo algorithm in law that guides how to draw these boundaries. It basically forces each constituency to be convex. There is still some freedom in the process, and there is still some gerrymandering, but harder than in some other countries.

Simply not having dynamic districts and having as many representatives for that area as there is population is a far better solution.

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.

Why does it need smaller provinces? For voting reasons or other reasons?

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.

I would say geography is very relevant for local government and regional govenrment. But maybe for federal government its not as relevant.

How would federal voting work in your system? Are there any actual proposals? How would you form a parliament?

What has happened over the past few decades is that all the provinces have spent most of the development budget in the area close to the provincial capitals. The reason is a mix of governments operating on limited budgets prioritizing certain areas to get maximum short term gdp growth, and ethnic racism/corruption/etc.

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.

To be sure, this is to large a discussion. As a method for spreading development increasing amount of regions and cutting some down some large can be good.

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.