Bus stops here: Shanghai lets riders design their own routes

Chiming in from Los Angeles, USA to say wow, must be nice living in a modern society that prioritizes public transit and peoples' ease of movement. I know, I know, it comes with trade offs of living in an authoritarian state, but the absolute abysmal state of infrastructure in this country is maddening. Ever been on a train in Denmark or Japan or Switzerland?

Seems like the form of government doesn't really matter, you can find examples from literally any end of the spectrum of better public infrastructure

Thank gawd for self driving cars…

I don’t know. This check and balance thing is not exactly working out here.

Suffrage is at the top of the hierarchy of needs, with decent infrastructure, decent wages, and public safety being much more fundamental needs for many people. There’s a reason that so many Filipinos, Indians, and Pakistanis choose to work in the Gulf.

Truly the worst of both worlds that we now have authoritarianism without good public transit.

No, but tell me about the trains in Canada or Australia or New Zealand instead. Curious what high speed, modern trains these nations have compared to China, or are they more backwards?

I hope the end state of self driving will be buses or vans doing on demand routing like Uber Pool is supposed to be but on a larger scale and maybe with fewer points for pickup and drop off.

They don't have high speed trains

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

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

Mexico City has excellent public transit without the authoritarianism.

Now we just have incompetent, horrifically corrupt authoritarians hell bent on dragging us back to oil and coal.

Los Angeles feels like countryside compared to Shanghai though.

There’s a lot of excuses but in the end America can’t live in the future because of its culture.

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.

>ease of movement

>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.

Uh, "we" ?

From someone who uses quotes „like this”?

... https://i.imgur.com/swpYbpv.png

I have been on trains in Denmark a plenty and our public transport planning is slow and bureaucratic.

We could learn from this example - both in major cities and areas where demand is too scattered to justify regular routes.

So does Melbourne. (Yes you can nitpick lots of things, but overall it works and gets slowly improved)

I don’t see what this has to do with authoritarianism. If anything it is an example of the opposite.

Anglosphere countries are highly car dependent.

This is a silly comparison. How many cities can China connect with trains vs Australia's 7 cities spread over almost 4k km in both axes... It's not as much "backwards" as requirements are vastly different. Melbourne-Canberra-Sydney could be useful and is getting started now, but I wouldn't expect more for decades.

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

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

On the other hand, you guys are early on in the authoritarian journey. We shall see a few years down the line if and how things get ugly.

I just find this crazy - you can have good public infrastructure without be authoritarian.

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

Public transport is in a lot of ways an aggregate expression of state power. It takes a lot of state capabilities to be able to execute public transport well.

But you cannot have good public infrastructure without a strong state (strength on its own isn't authoritarianism).

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.

Famously authoritarian Switzerland...

"Not every authorian regime" cars are just as authorian see Gulf states. I have a hard time seeing anything less opressing than a 2 tonne hunk of steel that you need to bring along everywhere.

It is such a tiresome trope, with people gushing over cars. We do not live in 1950 anymore.

No idea what this has to do with this thread. And you lost me at the progressive claim...

You seem to get quite hung up on ID

Of course. Plenty of countries do. It is not that one requires the other. It is that when authoritarians came to power in the last century, many of them initiated lavish public transport projects.

Maybe they're an immigrant?

I once rode the bus across LA. Years and dozens of countries later, it is still probably the single worst public transit experience I've ever had.

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.

AFAIK it’s the same in places with high security risks, like Turkey&Israel.

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).

In the US, it's mostly because the urban planning field was extremely embarrassed about "urban renewal" (rightly so) and switched to a new ideology that just completely forbids ever doing anything in case it's bad for anyone.

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.

Go protest against the government in both countries and see which is more progressive.

Dude, I have only ever rode busses in Europe, but such incidents are bound to happen, even in the most posh areas of the continent.

Switzerland has a weak federal government. The cantons are smaller than US states, but have more autonomy, and a lot of matters are decided by direct democracy. Yet they still seem to have good public infrastructure.

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

> Have you ever wondered why we have vertical gaps in public bathroom stalls?

You mean the gap between the floor and the walls? Isn’t that for ease of cleaning?

I mean the obvious is that Switzerland is rich, and money is power.

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].

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0DKsMJl6Z8

I guess where you come from definitely determine how you think: the bus stops look better than neighborhoods does not offend me, it actually shows collectively you can have something better than on your own, which makes a lot sense to me XD

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

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

Oh. You'll be relieved to know my office stalls are constructed in a way that the panels overlap those gaps. You're right it isn't hard, basically the door just opens in and is wider than the opening. There's no way to see in or out.

I love Mexico, had a very nice time there and would return, however there isn't without issues including authoritarianism, even if it comes from armed groups instead of the goverment.

Fortunately Greyhound in the US are resisting ID sweeps on their buses.

You have no idea what China being advanced compared to Australia has to do in a thread replying to someone claiming China is advanced compared to America?

Are you confused about threads? You're the first one saying China is more advanced here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43981378 as an answer to "it doesn't make sense to compare train systems in those two countries". What is even the point you're trying to make here?

Only because in Europe so many more people ride transit. The number of people who will be like that is generally fixed per population, and so if you have a lot of other (normal) people riding they a smaller %.

I think you may be operating under a misapprehension. The word "progressive" is the one people have taken issue with.

China is many things but progressive is not my adjective of choice (I've spent many years living there).

Ironically China used to have public toilets without doors. Only separators to your sides. It was more than 10 years ago, I don't know about now.

I don't think it's fair to consider cartel crime as authoritarianism. Usually crime is associated with inadequate government authority. Which is definitely an argument you could make about Mexico... but it's very different from China.

As a daily commuter on la metro bus and rail these incidents aren’t as common as people make out online. Nor do they ever really affect you when they happen.

Famously authoritarian pre-1950s USA [1]...

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-08-31/why-is-am...

I think the people that unfortunately where born on the wrong Mexican state would be of a different point of view.

For them we are comfortably discussing semantics on an Internet forum.