Bus stops here: Shanghai lets riders design their own routes

China is the only modern country that has both the capability and the lack of bureaucracy to just do things like this. It's simultaneously amazing to see and a depressing reminder of how badly western societies are crippled by rules of their own making. It would take years to make a single new bus route in any city, I don't think I've ever even seen that happen.

> It would take years to make a single new bus route in any city, I don't think I've ever even seen that happen.

It happens all the time in Western Europe, not sure what you’re talking about

Might be USian bias. I've seen bus routes change in the US but not to the degree of adding massive amounts of service.

Adding massive amounts of service costs a lot of money. It is always a bad thing if you see that anywhere in the world. It takes years for people to adjust their lives around better service, so your experiment will have data proving it was a wasted investment long before it works. If your city happens to do a massive investment despite my strong recommendation against it look close at the funding - if they don't have committed funding to continue that service for 10 years just ignore it as odds are too high they will cancel that service just as your start to rely on it and then you have to scramble to adjust your life (generally meaning buy a car - if you are car dependent you budget for the costs of a car, but if you normally use transit this is a sudden large expense that you probably can't handle).

Adding more service is a good thing, but it needs to be done in a sustainable way so that people can rely on it long term.

Sometimes cities will make massive changes to their network. By eliminating bad routes they can often find the money to fund good routes. This is a very different situation.

> Adding massive amounts of service costs a lot of money. It is always a bad thing if you see that anywhere in the world.

Dublin Bus has added massive amounts of service over the last decade, going from an incredibly deficient bus service to merely a bad bus service, and has in the course of this been able to significantly lower journey prices, due to increased usage.

> It takes years for people to adjust their lives around better service

I think this possibly _used_ to be the case, but the likes of Google Maps have changed that. You'll see bus routes introduced days ago with full buses, because people want to get to a place, they ask Google Maps, and it tells them. 30 years ago, people would take the bus routes they were used to, but today they will take the bus route their phone tells them to take, so introducing new services has become a lot easier.

(This does sometimes have unintended consequences, when routes intended as low-volume feeders get identified by the apps as a shortcut and swamped.)