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.

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.

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...