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Bus stops here: Shanghai lets riders design their own routes

(www.sixthtone.com)
491 points anigbrowl | 3 comments | 14 May 25 04:33 UTC | HN request time: 0.702s | source
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ketzo ◴[14 May 25 05:01 UTC] No.43981005[source]▶
This is really brilliant — like desire paths, but for transit. Obviously execution will be challenging, but the concept is fantastic, and China/Shanghai seems like one of the few places with the requisite density & state capacity to actually make this work.

Generally I think that the design of public spaces has SO MUCH room to be improved by just responding to the wisdom of the crowd.

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1. bluGill ◴[14 May 25 13:59 UTC] No.43984638[source]▶
If your transit operator is competent it is doing studies that look at more than just the people motivated to go through effort. They need to look for people who would use a route if it existed, but can't be bothered to open an app to ask for it - this is likely a much larger group than those who ask for something.
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2. ketzo ◴[14 May 25 14:32 UTC] No.43985023[source]▶
Well, certainly, a transit operator should be doing their own research — this isn’t a replacement for that.

But this is excellent as a complementary new piece of data, especially one that can be gathered so frequently and easily (especially compared to lengthy transit studies)

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3. bluGill ◴[14 May 25 15:27 UTC] No.43985704[source]▶
Either transit studies should not be so lengthy and there are plenty of know ways to gather data that are less biases; or there is good reason for the length. Note that the above is not an exclusive or - there is a time and place for short studies and a time for long studies. However either way the study needs to be carefully designed to not get biased data, and this app is biased data.