Bus stops here: Shanghai lets riders design their own routes

I like this; it's smart. It's a low tech solution that simply coordinates transit based on demand and self optimizes to serve that demand.

The value of buses and trains running on schedule is mainly that you can plan around it. But what if transit worked like Uber. Some vehicle shows up to pick you up. It might drop you off somewhere to switch vehicles and some other vehicle shows up to do that. All the way to your destination (as opposed to a mile away from there). As long as the journey time is predictable and reasonable, people would be pretty happy with that.

In various countries there are private vans that ride along the normal bus routes, marked with the same numbers as the buses. They work exactly like buses, collecting and leaving people at the stops, but they're much smaller and usually more frequent. I always thought they were an excellent solution- I don't get why there shouldn't be anything in between big, rare, and shared public buses and small, on-demand, individual private cars.

I'm not really aware of many rich countries that operate minibusses in urban areas. The bulk of the cost of operating public transport is labor so there's a strong incentive to scale.

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.

I had to do a visa-run in Vietnam a couple weeks ago and my trip to the border was exactly like that. After the bus got to their nominal final stop, they’ve unloaded all passengers except me, then made a couple other stops (they took a computer monitor from one place to another??), then finally told me to wait and take another bus, which I didn’t have to pay for. (Both buses were of the micro-bus / marshrutka kind, of course.)

I'm not sure why the should "operate" anything. Any taxi or Uber driver could autonomously decide to put up a route sign and start following that route, with a standard ticket price that makes the service profitable.

Yes! Just use an app to say where you want to go, and it tells you which of the 3 nearest bus stops to go to, and you get where you want to go reasonably quickly. No bus routes, just dynamic allocation and routing based on historical and up-to-the-minute demand.

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 suspect it's a pretty hard optimisation problem if you want to be lean. And if you want to overprovision... you end up with something that looks a bit like status quo.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love for this to exist. Just, as someone with optimisation experience, it seems pretty gnarly.

Even with regular, fixed routes, I've for some time argued the transit operator really need booking apps, on the basis that you really need the data on the full journey, and it'd transform e.g. bus routes if you could offer "there'll be a pickup within X minutes", without necessarily having the buses for it by falling back on renting cars. If you make people give their end destination, you can also do much like what the article suggests, but semi-automatic based on where those on the bus (and waiting at stops) are actually going right now.

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.

So the public transport authority stops running their own vehicles, and instead places tenders for individual routes? And anyone can bid on operating the route? I mean they already do that with subcontractors for contingencies etc.

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.

I think the cheapest and easiest starting point would be to offer people a time guarantee if they book, and contract with cab companies to provide capacity.

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.

> So the public transport authority stops running their own vehicles, and instead places tenders for individual routes? And anyone can bid on operating the route?

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.

Hong Kong

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_light_bus

Example of this in ex-Soviet countries:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka

Vancouver has 20-person minibuses serving suburban routes. They are what make the rest of the transit system work.

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.

I don't even know if my local bus company tracks when people get on and off. It'd need facial recognition to track each person getting on, and when that person got back off the bus.

This will never work in US for two reasons:

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, ..."

I don't think marsa, as they're called where I'm from, are the same thing as described here. At least in my home country, they serve routes that don't get enough traffic for a large bus, so they have their own numbers and routes. Usually you would get one if you're going to a small village in the countryside or similar.

Busses cause nuisances so routes are regulated. It is also difficult to operate them at a profit. If you let the market decide freely on a per route basis most routes would disappear.

Hmm; not sure then. I remember riding one of these in Odesa about a decade ago, from the airport to the city (presumably a route that would be busy enough to have a bus line.)

New York:

https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/interactive-new-...

Even just letting people know how full the bus is, in advance, would help a lot with that decision to take a cab etc. There could easily be a map or list of the physical buses and how full they are.

Rich countries have both buses and taxis. These sit between the two in terms of both quality and price. I don't think it's a cost issue but a licensing one.

From some googling it appears a major reason for the community shuttles is that they are allowed to operate on narrower, suburban streets than full sized busses and have lower fuel consumption per mile.

I'll concede geography limits are a valid reason for smaller vehicles.

Well I was indeed thinking of marshrutkas, at least as a saw and used them (many) years ago.

> NIMBYs will oppose the bus passing on their street - "too much noise, peoples, ..."

It is funny because nobody ever opposes Amazon or UPS trucks...

I think if we can get people to use a service, they won't oppose it?

Quite the perspective. I'm not unsympathetic to the idea of private owned and operated public transport.

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.

I live on a greenway street in Portland (bikes are prioritized, car traffic is intentionally made difficult), but I would have no problem with a bus route down it. Having said that, I don't bike and I also don't care about Amazon trucks. I've lived in NYC, SF, BsAs, Madrid and Saigon. The performative hypocrisy of people in Portland who claim to want an equitable society and claim to care about the environment, whilst using those talking points to prevent any kind of urban growth or new housing, is shocking. The people who'd have a problem with a bus going down the street are the same ones who lobbied to turn it into a biking street and take away parking in the name of the people and the environment. It's all a lie. A thin cover for protecting their property values. AKA keeping the neighborhood white. There's no racism as safe as the racism you can explain away with progressive corporate-speak and some spandex bike tights.

Visited Florence last year and certain bus lines there were operated by minibusses. I guess some routes with the narrow streets in the city center are impossible to drive with big vehicles.

It's like rethinking buses not as rigid lines, but as flexible, scalable logistics

The most Western place I encountered this was West Belfast, twenty years ago. This was after the peace agreement but before public transport had been fully restored. So there were London-style black taxis in certain areas that operated on a shared fee basis; no meter, you'd get in and agree a price, and there might be other people in there going the same way.

Important to note that this was fully private and unregulated.

> NIMBYs will oppose the bus passing on their street

Why do they get a say on buses? You don't get to veto other drivers even in front of your own house.

Buses aren't communism.

This is usually done with WiFi MAC addresses. I know that London did this for tube journeys but I'm not sure anybody's done it for busses. You can also use smart card IDs if there is an RFID payment system.

The introduction of randomised MACs might have put an end to it.

But communism is busses.

This is really a bad idea. I absolutely do not want to explain where I am going anytime I get on a bus or train. In Switzerland, most people just get on because they already have some general ticket for the year or month. And even those that don't, you can just enable 'EasyRide' and as long as that if active, at the end of the day (or when you disable it) it will calculate whatever you used.

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.

Once you're paying the fixed monthly cost of a car (depreciation, maintenance, insurance) it rarely makes sense to use a bus. The exception is when there's insufficient parking at the destination but most cities have already decided not to go that route and it's too late to change it.

What does that even mean? You've never encountered a capitalist bus?

Citymapper tried something similar in London a few years ago: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/21/citymappe...

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.

I have. But I've never encountered a communist sportscar.

My fairly rich French city operates minibuses, mostly aimed at old people, which run through the otherwise non-drivable city center. Of course these are short, low-throughput routes.

I tried it out at the time. It was a minibus driving only me around for the price of a bit more than a bus fare.

I think the comment you reply to perhaps fundamentally misunderstands the economics of public transport. You raise good points about the benefits of having central planning for these things, but IMO the most important factor the people often mis is: public transport is not meant to be a revenue generator.

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.

> This is really a bad idea. I absolutely do not want to explain where I am going anytime I get on a bus or train.

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.

They operate in post-soviet cities too, especially between microdistricts.

So, some centrally planned systems are great and some are not. I would point out that the NYC subway system, which was the most extensive in the world after London's until fairly recently (when both were overtaken in length by a dozen systems in China), was largely built by private companies during its major growth phase prior to the 1940s. It has grown at a snail's pace ever since. The IRT, BRT, BMT, IND and ISS created much of the network as it is today [0]. This was at a time when there was both a lot of free market competition as well as increasing (but not insurmountable) regulation on what was permissible. To me, that is the ideal combination to generate growth and efficiency.

>> 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...

>> 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...

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'.

In Maricopa County, each city has discretion to operate a system of circulators or shuttles. Many of them do. Many of them are fare-free.

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.

Hongkong has an extensive mini-bus network -- the green tops (regularly scheduled and more tightly controlled) and the red tops (the wild west). Also, Tokyo runs mini-buses in the (richest) central core between areas that don't have connecting subways & trains.

On the sidebar, probably more interesting than this dreary debate about busses, I noticed you altered your spelling to the generally accepted version. It made me look it up, and it was interesting because I've always spelt it with a double-S. According to MW:

>> 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.

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/plural-of-bus

My area has a dial-a-ride service where you can schedule a ride and they essentially make an on demand bus route for it. I've never actually used it though because it's just really not convenient. You have to call a dispatch number to schedule trips like 3 days in advance, and can only cancel 24 hours before your trip. And you can only schedule trips on certain weekdays (doesn't run on weekends at all) depending on which city/town you're leaving from or going to.

A good example of how good ideas can suck with bad implementation.

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...

In my country, any city that is profitable enough for Uber&co also already have enough buses. When you already have a bus every 5 minutes, adding the capacity of some vans will not change anything.

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.

That "What if" is a stupid idea that has been around for years. Professionals have written about this extensively - https://humantransit.org/category/microtransit for example. The fundamentals mean it can never work for anyone anywhere - including aliens with some arbitrary advanced technology.

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.

Busses will be electric soon, silent then

If the bus is full then the transit agency needs to run more service. Unless this is a "short bus" or your fares are unreasonably low (free fares are bad for this reason) your bus is paying for itself and you can run more service on that route to capture even more people.

Charge a small fee and those routes would be profitable on their own. You can of course add reduced/free fares for homeless/students if you wish, but most people can afford a fare and that money can go into running more service which the typical adult needs a lot more than the savings of a small fare.

No, it is an example of why the idea is bad and always will be. Experts in transit have written extensively about this. https://humantransit.org/category/microtransit for example.

> 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.

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)

Which is not something anyway wants. People need ridged predictable schedules so they can figure out how to plan their life. There are spontaneous trips people make (I burned supper - guess we are going out to eat tonight). Meetings sometimes run late, and sometimes end early, sometimes I want to stay around and chat after the meeting sometimes I want to get right home. I need instant flexibility and predictable routes gives me that since I don't have to meet their schedule. Meetings always start on time - flexible routes too often will not be predictable because they detour for someone else. Meetings often don't open the door until a few minutes before - predictable lines mean I can tell the person with the key when I'll be there and I will be right (important if it is bad weather)

Flexible routes remove the mass from mass transit.

Buss means "kiss" or "to kiss". Thus I always use buses to ensure people don't get confused.

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.

I fled Portland screaming to New Orleans over a decade ago and I haven’t regretted it for one moment.

I would say Gen Z has a very different take on the word bussin

See: Маршрутка (Marshrutka), Colectivo, Matatu

NYC has this. Bus locations and estimated number of passengers on board: https://bustime.mta.info/m/index?q=M5

I think this is one of those ideas that sounds good on paper but breaks down in practice.

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.

Did you get hurt by a bus comming here?

> you need a smartphone to take public transit

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.

Dollar vans are real [0]. Real in the same sense as nutcrackers and bodega kitties: endemic, well-loved, and officially discouraged.

[0] https://citylimits.org/how-nyc-dollar-vans-are-adapting-for-...

Then price to you was just a but more than a bus fare. However the real price to the city works out to about 15x as much as a bus fare. Does your city really want to subsidize this (it would be a similar price for your city to just give you a basic car!)

They also do less damage to roads. Large vehicles do disproportionately more damage.

They are also cheaper to buy, clean, and maintain.

In my experience, on a public bus there is reasonable chance of getting a working USB A socket. But as a private business, it's not a complete replacement of the public bus system, however apps are used by people already to book on-the-fly cheap group taxi trips in Shanghai.

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.

What is the difference between the red and green tops? In my experience the green ones are kinda wild as well, stop and go anywhere, super interesting. Too bad my Hongkongnese sucks.

Edit: Bisrepita shared the info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_light_bus

The main alternative to buses is private cars running on public roads. Those public roads are a massive subsidy for private cars. If private cars paid directly for their road usage, then it's much more likely that private bussing could successfully compete.

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.

These examples are all easily solved.

I.e. replace the bus stops with terminals/kiosks which give you full service, potentially another in the middle of the bus.

One challenge with the SMS thing is when I travel from US to Europe I fairly routinely get a local SIM and turn off my US number.

Hat tip to Bisrepita for the earlier share.

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).

There’s a regional transit system with smaller buses out where I live about 50 miles west of Boston. My empirical observation is it’s pretty just elderly who take them.

The status quo in many cities is ~5x overprovisioning just in terms of capacity actively on the road at any given time, and way more than that if you count idle capacity. You could overprovision by a lot and still come out ahead.

gypsy cabs are also a negative externality particularly with unscrupulous actors

Why be profitable? Charging fares on a free circulator is counterproductive. It costs to maintain and enforce fare boxes, and you’re adding friction to a system that’s designed to bring riders to the main routes. And you’re already running more service! The more successful circulators you have, the more passengers will be using the main system.

> One of the amazing things of the current system, as simple as it is, is that it's predictable and doesn't require coordination.

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.

Roads to not have unlimited bandwidth. I think this _is_ a good idea, but has to have some boundaries on how it functions or you will gridlock your city by accident.

Via Transportation (ridewithvia.com) started out doing pooled cab rides but pivoted to doing what you describe, seemingly successfully. Lots of value for school transit, para transit, etc as well. I have no affiliation with them but I think the model is very promising.

> So if there's a teen without a smartphone, they can't take the bus, nor can someone who's phone died, etc.

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?

I didn't get the impression this was totally replacing static routes. Seemed to be augmenting it. But also, while your concerns are valid, I don't think they are large enough to not try these things.

Any money you make from fares is another source of money that can be used to run more service and make the network better. The vast majority of your riding population is not poor and would gladly trade a little money for better service. (if the vast majority of your riders are poor you must be running really bad service)

"I absolutely do not want to explain where I am going anytime I get on a bus or train"

And why should the bus driver care about this? You can get off the bus if it doesn't suit you.

> Why should we handicap new, shiny things to make them usable without a phone?

(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).

> India and Thailand and most of Latin America have great privately operated local transport, from city busses to pickup trucks to regular route taxis, all self-organizing without needing a centralized database to manage them.

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.

The free circulator network is made better by the sheer number of people riding it, not the revenue it can bring in.

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.

Yeah I absolutely hate the SMS thing.

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.

Here in Germany it's fairly common for kids aged perhaps six or seven and up to take public transport by themselves. They might have a dumb phone or occasionally a smart watch, but I rarely see them with their own smart phones.

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.

"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."

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.

Mostly yes but,

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.

We're piloting VIA Link in San Antonio, TX to add on last mile Uber style from transit stations.

Link: https://www.viainfo.net/link/

My few attempts to take a bus in San Diego lead me to believe the schedule is for entertainment purposes only.

As a forty-something semi-retired electrician, the following apply to me:

(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

If I damage my phone or it gets stolen I have to walk home because the dystopian iOS/Android with SIM that requires ID ecosystem here won't actually allow me to simply use other computers I might still have access to so I'd have to equip my children with 2 devices and 2 SIMs in addition to cash, a debit card and an ID card to show that they're entitled to use their bus ticket.

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.

You're an outlier. I can safely say this doesn't apply to the majority of the population.

> One immediate problem that comes to mind is that you need a smartphone to take public transit.

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.

In China in particular a smartphone is the primary means to interact with restaurant menus, place orders, and pay for many things. Rentable battery packs are also pretty ubiquitous.

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 yet, nearly everything in Germany requires a stable physical address. Meanwhile, the state of the housing market is such that it's hard to get one.

Insane idea. You can either tell me your social security number or you can stop commenting on Hacker News.

(Who am I? Well why should I care to tell you that?)

And therefor they don't deserve to ride the bus?

Since when are lawmakers and public servants concerned with providing utility for only the majority of citizens? That would, in aggregate, alienate many people from various public services.

What is your point? For many purposes, a homeless shelter can be used as a physical address for citizens in need.

Vienna's Nightlines (formerly ASTAX, now Rufbus) are partially like this.

Lawmakers and public servants have ALWAYS been concerned with majorities.

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.

a: Then get one. Virtually everyone has a phone.

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.

If they want to use an ad-hoc bus that runs exactly where people request it in real time, then YES. They should not expect it to work for them.

What about the significant number of homeless people who don't want to live in a shelter?

I highly recommend you volunteer at a soup kitchen some day.

IME this is only a problem really in American cities because we put as close to zero effort into public transit as possible. We just plop buses on the road and expect that to do something.

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.

I'd [OC] rather ride a predictable train/subway... but the density / bureaucracy of most American jurisdictions keeps this to a few limited megacities (I have lived in the SFBay & NYC, both; won't go back).

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).

Axle weight is a really good point tbh, if you don't have to pay labor costs for the driver it'd make a ton of sense to downsize. Ideally this would be accomplished with taxes on gross vehicle weight. Would make smaller vehicles inherently more economical.

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).

> if there's a teen without a smartphone

I live in Shanghai. Many if not all kids have smart watches with payment apps.

Who does not use the sewage system?

Or can't, because they're not homeless?

> It has grown at a snail's pace ever since.

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.

> 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.

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.

It's not an invasion of your privacy for a bus driver to ask where you're heading.

It’s a very American thing to do. Barely fund an essential public service and then cry about how privatization solves all the problems created by that neglect.

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”

I don't really get the relation between your comment and mine, I'm sorry. You don't need an address to use the public transport in Germany, for example.

Septic systems are used outside cities when no sewers are available. They're very common in the US.

I do! That's how I know plenty of homeless people have phones. There's a disconnect between how people think smartphone ownership works on this site and how it actually works.

Try requesting a special connection and extra treatment for your sewage.

There is a reason well funded transit agencies do not go into that direct, in fact, the are investing many billions going into the opposite direction. Are all these people just really stupid? That is not to say dynamic information about traffic can't help with things, but its very much an optimization, not the core of the system.

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...

Not just America. Europe is not just big cities and Swiss, it happens in Europe too, especially as cities get smaller.

I tried NOLA for a few weeks in my 20s - loved it, got a job bussing tables at Brennans, moved into a house with some musicians, lost all $4k of my savings drinking and gambling, and called my sister for money to take a greyhound home. I really dig that town, and Portland blows, but I think it's one of the places I'd probably lose my shit in. Some places are just too easy to stay out all night in.. and have a kind of depressing spiral for a habitual drinker/gambler/sex addict. Vegas, Prague, and NOLA are the three that I can think of where I go to the dark places, go broke and get suicidal. Also, not ironically, my favorite places in the world. But I learned that I need to have a ticket out.

you made the choices, deal with the consequences.

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"

it's philosophically wrong to say "you need to buy a phone, give some company your personal information, and pay for connectivity on a recurring basis, simply to be able to use a public service"

Thankfully, I am one of the few that did not come here with that in mind. So my sanity and financial solvency have only gradually deteriorated.