Bus stops here: Shanghai lets riders design their own routes

Tangent:

I’ve often thought that it would be great to let people design their own political districts to reduce gerrymandering

At the polling place you’d get a map with your census tract and then be asked “which two or three adjacent tracts are most similar to your community”. Eventually you’d end up with some sort of gram matrix for tract-to-tract affinity, and then you could apply some algorithmic segmentation.

Two problems:

- this is far too complex for most voters to understand, much less trust, what’s happening

- the fact it’s “algorithmic” would give a sheen of pseudo objectivity, but the selection of the actual algorithm would still allow political infouence over boundaries

Comment 2: I have actually had the same idea as you in a slightly different context. My country is in urgent need of creating new smaller provinces by dividing the existing ones. But there is wide disagreement on what the boundaries should be.

One method would be to decide the capitals of the new provinces, and then ask people in each district which province they would most like to join. If there is contiguous land to the winning provincial capital for every district, then the solution just pops out.

Why does it need smaller provinces? For voting reasons or other reasons?

You can separate the political and the voting districts, at least when you are voting on higher levels.

Also there is a question if you want to expand the current system (ie more provinces), or if you want to add a new layer into the chain (ie sub-provinces). Both can be good depending on what you want to achieve.

Britain is currently introducing new layers. They have new district mayors for new major regions.

But Britain is quite strange in how their system works, mostly because they has not been a real revolution for 800 years.

What has happened over the past few decades is that all the provinces have spent most of the development budget in the area close to the provincial capitals. The reason is a mix of governments operating on limited budgets prioritizing certain areas to get maximum short term gdp growth, and ethnic racism/corruption/etc.

Now, people in the undeveloped areas correctly feel like they are not represented by their governments. Creating more provinces means more spread out development. It also prevents the largest province from bullying the federal government into complying to its whims.

There are already 1.5 administrative layers below provinces (thanks to Britain I might add), but they don't function well at all. But that discussion cannot fit into a HN comment.