Bus stops here: Shanghai lets riders design their own routes

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.

Buses aren't communism.

But communism is busses.

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

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

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.

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'.

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

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

Did you get hurt by a bus comming here?

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.

> 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.

> 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.