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Bus stops here: Shanghai lets riders design their own routes

(www.sixthtone.com)
491 points anigbrowl | 1 comments | 14 May 25 04:33 UTC | HN request time: 0.223s | source
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jillesvangurp ◴[14 May 25 06:33 UTC] No.43981512[source]▶
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.

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1. notpushkin ◴[14 May 25 07:12 UTC] No.43981734[source]▶
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.)