It sounds great, but if this idea is a result of cost-cutting then it might not be so great in reality.

The actual money can’t be the issue. It’s $136 for failure to stop at a stop sign in WA. If they enforced that for 30 seconds per day the cities would be wealthy beyond belief.

Or maybe not-but we’d have much safer traffic! Thus enabling revenue from fewer deaths.

But I digress- the problem with “revenue” for cities is they actively avoid getting it. If they actually wanted or desired more funds for the city, simply enforcing laws is all that is needed. It’s just not desired to have revenue I suppose, if it means enforcing laws and collecting dues owed.

Yes yes I’m probably being “unrealistic” but honestly? Maybe not.

surely then the census tracts would just become the new thing to gerrymander

Gerrymandering is much more favorable in a FPTP system of elections than other types of elections. Winner takes all really incentives doing whatever it takes to keep winning.

Instead of your quite complex idea of segmentation, entities should simply move to a slightly more complex election system than FPTP, but which has reduced incentive for gerrymandering. For example, systems that give parties some seats based on the percentage of votes they get in the whole country/province etc.

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.

I also wonder if it would be stable enough over time

> which two or three adjacent tracts are most similar to your community

From gerrymandering to gentrifying in one easy step ;)

There are good reasons to force some mixing or suddenly your area only caters to the rich people while the non-similar area is known for making all the hard decisions for all the problems.

Seems like the form of government doesn't really matter, you can find examples from literally any end of the spectrum of better public infrastructure

Thank gawd for self driving cars…

I don’t know. This check and balance thing is not exactly working out here.

Truly the worst of both worlds that we now have authoritarianism without good public transit.

No, but tell me about the trains in Canada or Australia or New Zealand instead. Curious what high speed, modern trains these nations have compared to China, or are they more backwards?

Mexico City has excellent public transit without the authoritarianism.

Now we just have incompetent, horrifically corrupt authoritarians hell bent on dragging us back to oil and coal.

Los Angeles feels like countryside compared to Shanghai though.

There’s a lot of excuses but in the end America can’t live in the future because of its culture.

People will say stupid stuff like "oh it’s because we pay for their defense", or "oh it’s because we have freedom", or "but but this would never work here, because we’re really different than anyone else".

But actually? It’s because we’re used to this shit and change makes us uncomfortable. We also really only care about ourselves, not our broader community.

Have you ever wondered why we have vertical gaps in public bathroom stalls? Inertia. There’s no reason to have them, but nobody cares enough to improve it. A better design isn’t more expensive or more difficult, we just don’t want it enough to make it happen.

We’re stuck in a local maximum.

>ease of movement

>authoritarian state

China has high speed rail. When you enter the train station security checks your national ID then screens your person and belongings. Buying a ticket requires scanning ID. Going from the station down to the platform requires scanning ID. On the train sometimes police come aboard and check everyone’s ID. When you get off the train you have to scan ID. Riding the bus or subway was one of the very few things that does not require scanning national ID or registering an account linked to national ID. However if you ride a bus into Beijing there are checkpoints requiring everyone to get off, get searched and show ID.

I have been on trains in Denmark a plenty and our public transport planning is slow and bureaucratic.

We could learn from this example - both in major cities and areas where demand is too scattered to justify regular routes.

I once rode the bus across LA. Years and dozens of countries later, it is still probably the single worst public transit experience I've ever had.

It wasn't because of the bus itself, or the routes, or anything like that. But because the willingness of people to tolerate one passenger screaming, threatening others, refusing to move for a handicapped woman, etc.

American public transit is a cultural problem, not an infrastructure one.

Like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path

> China is the only modern country that has both the capability and the lack of bureaucracy to just do things like this

Habibi, come to the UAE or Qatar

> the lack of bureaucracy to just do things like this

sorry to disappoint you but Shanghai is the place where ride-sharing wasn't even allowed in its main international airport just 12 months ago. bureaucracy mixed with corruption is at shockingly bad level.

Check out Warsaw, Poland. Public transit is excellent, clean, and basically gets you anywhere via bus, tram, subway, or one of 4+ ridesharing apps. Bike lane coverage is also pretty good. It's obviously an order of magnitude smaller than Shanghai, but so are most Western cities.

Good overview of the system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Kn2tL51bBs&t=8s

> 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

Berlin and Hamburg, both in Germany, would like a word.

These concepts have been popping up in the last few years all over the world.

The Shanghai example is special because it uses actual busses, and actual stops.

Now, demand calculation in the west is easy: Students always go from where they live to the school they are being schooled at in the morning, and return either at around 1pm or around 4pm. You don't need a fancy system to put those lines on the map: check when school ends, add 15 minutes, then have busses drive to major population centres (with smaller villages being served similarly when the bus arrives).

The elderly want to go to and from doctors, and to supermarkets. That, too, is easily manageable in the 'students at school' ofttime and follows similar patterns.

Workers are similar, especially for large workplaces. Smaller workplaces - now it gets interesting, especially when there is some movement between workers and places of business (and, as a third aspect, time).

In Shanghai, that only is possible because you have a large overlap between

1. people who ride public transit and 2. are tech-savvy enough to use the demand-calculating system. Also 3. as you are essentially making schedules to plan around obsolete, you need to provide enough service that people aren't surprise-lost in the city because the route changed randomly.

Where I live, public transit is used by students and the elderly (who don't do 'internet things' and pay for their ticket in cash, with the driver. The essential young-adult to middle-aged population doesn't use public transit, because it is too slow, too expensive, and too inflexible for their work schedules. Good luck getting the critical mass of data to design bus routes there.

I love the Swiss approach to things. Possibly the only sane country.

Routes actually don't change that much, is mostly the schedule. The article however is more about the route and less about the schedule.

I was going to say this! Moia is pretty awesome

What does that mean? The links doesn't help explain it much?

In the UK/London there are some bus routes where you just stick your arm out and the bus will stop to get you where you stand ("hail and ride") and equally you can just ring a bell when onboard and the driver stops as soon as there is somewhere convenient to let you off. The route is fixed though.

Is it that sort of thing?

This is just a shared taxi, no? They have existed for a long time at small scales. For example airports and hospitals often have such services.

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 had to do a visa-run in Vietnam a couple weeks ago and my trip to the border was exactly like that. After the bus got to their nominal final stop, they’ve unloaded all passengers except me, then made a couple other stops (they took a computer monitor from one place to another??), then finally told me to wait and take another bus, which I didn’t have to pay for. (Both buses were of the micro-bus / marshrutka kind, of course.)

Yes! Just use an app to say where you want to go, and it tells you which of the 3 nearest bus stops to go to, and you get where you want to go reasonably quickly. No bus routes, just dynamic allocation and routing based on historical and up-to-the-minute demand.

If you tell the system your desire well in advance, you pay less. "I need to be at the office at 9 and home by 6 every weekday". Enough area-to-area trips allocate buses. Smaller, off-peak, or short-notice group demand brings minivans. Short-notice uncommon trips bring cars. For people with disabilities or heavy packages, random curb stops are available.

Then you remove private cars from cities entirely. Park your private car outside the city, or even better, use the bikeshare-style rentals. No taxis or Ubers, only public transit, with unionized, salaried drivers. Every vehicle on the road is moving and full of people and you can get rid of most parking spaces and shrink most parking lots.

It's not rocket science. It's computer science.

Fantasy, because it would allow us to drastically reduce the manufacturing of automobiles.

Even with regular, fixed routes, I've for some time argued the transit operator really need booking apps, on the basis that you really need the data on the full journey, and it'd transform e.g. bus routes if you could offer "there'll be a pickup within X minutes", without necessarily having the buses for it by falling back on renting cars. If you make people give their end destination, you can also do much like what the article suggests, but semi-automatic based on where those on the bus (and waiting at stops) are actually going right now.

Today, ridership gives hard data on where people will go and when given the current availability. Offer a guaranteed pickup, and you get much closer to having data on where people actually would want to go, and even more reliably than people voting on a "wouldn't it be nice if" basis.