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'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.