Bus stops here: Shanghai lets riders design their own routes

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'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.

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.

> 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 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-...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

See: Маршрутка (Marshrutka), Colectivo, Matatu

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-...

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

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

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

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.

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.

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)

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.

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

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).