Bus stops here: Shanghai lets riders design their own routes

(www.sixthtone.com)

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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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thanatos519 ◴[14 May 25 07:16 UTC] No.43981761[source]▶

>>43981512 #

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.

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1. rich_sasha ◴[14 May 25 07:23 UTC] No.43981813[source]▶

>>43981761 #

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.

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2. vidarh ◴[14 May 25 07:35 UTC] No.43981899[source]▶

>>43981813 (TP) #

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.

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3. HPsquared ◴[14 May 25 08:05 UTC] No.43982105[source]▶

>>43981899 #

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.

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4. bluGill ◴[14 May 25 13:30 UTC] No.43984311{3}[source]▶

>>43982105 #

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.

5. senkora ◴[14 May 25 14:49 UTC] No.43985220{3}[source]▶

>>43982105 #

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

6. wat10000 ◴[14 May 25 17:16 UTC] No.43986984[source]▶

>>43981813 (TP) #

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.

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