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.
That does not mean law enforcement is bad or unnecessary. It just means that law enforcements primary purpose should be to keep people safe and educate, not to fund the districts
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Switzerland where I live very much has this, with 26 top level provinces and only some 8 million there is and a crazy amount of localism, mostly only have 100k people. Each with their own school systems, their own tax polices and almost everything else too. That is of course because of a history of slowly growing together with many compromises (and a civil war thought about the issue of centralization in 1847).
Most former colonial powers preferred to set up provinces as that requires less people to administer and control, and nobody cares about the hinterlands anyway, as long as there weren't major resources there.
So I think this is a good policy. But system do need to be in place to make sure these areas work together on things like transport policy. This is still a major struggle here.
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.
How would federal voting work in your system? Are there any actual proposals? How would you form a parliament?
And its also makes more sense, specially in historical places. In Switzerland, the idea to move around political and voting districts dynamically would be deeply a-historical.
Its simply the case that if more people move to an area, that area gets more people that represent it in parliament.
But the US for various reasons, focused on single representative districts. Those are good for some things, but also cause many, many problems. The positives are that it makes it easier to campaign, because you ahve to convinced fewer people. And its proven to generate a diverse set of candidates (assuming no gerrymandering). But its also easier to gerrymander, and it doesn't necessarily give the best overall set of candidates for a large groups of people.
Modern research suggest that using a propitiation based multi representative district is a far better solution.
For a well researched system for that, I would suggest: https://www.starvoting.org/star-pr
So create a few big districts, then use a good voting system.
Alas, nothing came of that study, and traffic in Rome has not improved in the incurring ~30 years.
I watched an in-flight documentary about the architecture of soviet rural bus stops. Each one of them looked like it cost most than the neighborhoods they serviced.
A lot of western governments are rather weak, I swear baumols cost disease and spiraling social/retirement/debt spending has crippled their ability to provide for the public.
It's also partly because they read The Population Bomb in the 70s and literally decided to ban housing/transit in order to stop people from having kids.
But it's true that public infrastructure is more dependent on local rather than federal governments. I think the best example of weak local governments has to be the UK [1].
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-08-31/why-is-am...
It is such a tiresome trope, with people gushing over cars. We do not live in 1950 anymore.
China is many things but progressive is not my adjective of choice (I've spent many years living there).
For them we are comfortably discussing semantics on an Internet forum.
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.
From someone who uses quotes „like this”?
You mean the gap between the floor and the walls? Isn’t that for ease of cleaning?
I mean vertical at the side of the door. You can literally make eye contact with the occupant as you walk by.
>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 despise this, not because I’m worried about the government but because it makes me feel restrained to act in a specific manner because this is not my space and I’m being watched. It’s dehumanizing.
In most of the Europe you feel like you own the place even if there are many rules. In Eastern Europe it’s even better, you feel free and nobody is watching you. The government and the wider system feels non-existent(which is the other end of the spectrum and can result in unmaintained infrastructure but it does have its charm).
We could learn from this example - both in major cities and areas where demand is too scattered to justify regular routes.
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.
Habibi, come to the UAE or Qatar
I guess I see the unfinished projects as being the proof: The World and the 2nd Palm haven’t been finished because they (I assume) stopped making commercial sense to the developers.
I would finally note that Dubai specifically has little oil and gas wealth. Maybe 1% directly and 10% that comes as subsidy from AD which has plenty. The rest is literally just a combination of smart and commercially savvy governance combined with an essentially unlimited amount of desert to build in.
Does feel like the Singaporean economic miracle is under a lot of pressure. Demographics and retirement savings I guess being a big part of it.
And slaves.
Lots and lots of modern day slaves.
Once I had an issue with bus routes for my father's employees (similar problem, high density route with fewer routes). I put a request on their dashboard from abroad and within days, their reply came back with them confirming a trio of new buses to cater to that route.
Another time, I had an idea for bus route planning (not related to above, that relied on a simple ping system for bus driver notification). I sent an email describing the idea in short to the Emirati CEO of the bus authority, and within 15 minutes, he acknowledged my email and connected me with his advisor to set up a meeting the next day. The advisor (an Indian with a US PhD in urban transport systems) discussed my idea through over a meeting.
Oh, and there are self-driving bus demos currently happening in Abu Dhabi right now.
Well, that's what happens if you can just throw money at problems. In Germany, it would most likely get rejected because there are no spare buses/drivers or budget for the fuel, and even if there was money it would likely be delayed for at least one year because the new route would have to pass through the usual tender/bid system first.
And in terms of overall development strategy, its very often very Americanized. Big highways, big highway interchanges. Dubai is known for basically building everything along a very big highway. There is no reason for a country this small to ever have a highway this large.
Given how trivially easy they are geographically their modal share in public transport is not very high at all.
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.
https://www.ncesc.com/which-european-countries-dont-have-ube...
So Shanghai seems indeed low-bureaucracy, in comparison.
Good overview of the system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Kn2tL51bBs&t=8s
Lots of real (and not paper) economic growth.
But spot on about the mentality. A lot of that great infrastructure here was inherited, and the attitude around it's continued development has been super conservative. Not to mention the Berlin government is borderline insolvent.
Just look at the cluster fuck that was car free Friedrichstr.
Warsaw is great, need to visit Poland again, have a huge soft spot for pączki.
https://culture.pl/en/article/fat-thursday-polands-tastiest-...
Even in Lisbon, it seemed that public transit was a much bigger hassle, both in time and cost, than a ride-sharing app.
We had a family of 4. Fares are about €3-4 each so €12 per ride in one direction. Ride-shares were about €9. We also abused the intro ride-share offers by creating separate accounts and got that down to €4.50.
I only use ride sharing for longer 30+ minute trips, and usually that is between 10 and 15 euros one direction.
It happens all the time in Western Europe, not sure what you’re talking about
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.
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.)
Great if you can pull that off in your city, but I'm not confident you can. For that matter if you can pull it off it means you are lacking smaller investments many years before that would have resulted in some transport that you could have grown over time to what you are finally getting.
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.
Re-planning your network once a year is plenty.
What the hell? That just seems bonkers. Here, the city council is berating the transport authority for slow rollout of 24 hour routes...
For instance in the UK (in 2022), a whopping 6% of commuting trips were by bus and 9% were by rail. Even less for leisure: 3% of leisure trips are by bus, 3% by rail. That's terrible market share!
Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/transport-statistic...
Most of what is lacking is the money needed to run that service. That is not an innovation.
Try visiting Switzerland, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and so on.
When rural trains in China run as well as Swiss trains, come back to me.
Huh? Chinese government is insanely bureaucratic.
It’s true that if there’s something the govt wants they enlist the entire bureaucracy in favor of that and make it happen rapidly, but just because the bureaucracy can be functional, and even effective, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
I mean, that’s basically the definition of a bureaucracy, which while some may treat the word as synonymous for inefficient or incapable, it really isn’t, and the Chinese bureaucracy is proof of that.
Indeed. It takes a pretty big bureaucracy to be able to ban the wikipedia. Oh, and ban gmail & all of google. And all news sites in general. Can customize your bus schedule though I guess.
Or, if you want to go small, my school district changed bus routes with a 48 hour turn around time when we moved to our home in the country, and again when our teenager's schedule changed and he could no longer drive the younger sibling home.
changing routes is needed of course. Cities chanre and you need to follow that. They don't change fast though. long term routes also drive change as people adqust their life to what they can do.
I live in a city in a Western European country which adds multiple new bus routes a year, and always has done. Honestly I'd assume this is the case for any medium to large city.
The unusual bit about the Shanghai initiative is that, presumably, they have significant _spare_ capacity, to be used for low-volume/experimental stuff like this. Spare capacity is a slightly weird thing for a bus network to have; they tend to run basically on the edge.
This is simply not true. Madison, WI just finished a massive revamp of their entire bus system where many existing routes were re-aligned or replaced with rapid transit routes with dedicated lanes. Despite massive amounts of naysaying from local conservatives the project has been a massive success and has resulted in a huge bump in ridership [1].
The whole thing happened because the city elected a mayor [2] who was laser focused on making transit happen and just kept working on it.
I think US politics has a major incentive alignment problem - if your local politician's genuine personal success metric is "improved transit" then you're likely to end up with improved transit. If success is "got re-elected", "got more corporate donations" or "used mayorship as a stepping stone to national politics" then you're likely to end up with a milquetoast compromiser who never does anything of substance because they don't want to be accountable for anything.
[1] https://www.channel3000.com/news/madison-metro-sees-brt-wind...
It all comes down to corruption. In the west we are accustomed to thinking we are much less corrupt, but that is proving not to be less and less true every day.
Corruption is loyalty to a man over a mission. All systems that have good outcomes are when the man that people are loyal to (because he can punish dissent and reward loyalty, such as with wages) chooses a mission over their own self interest and enforce subordination to a mission over themselves.
China is a country that is capable of punishing their richest citizens, while the US and most of the west are not. China executed the executives that poisoned infant formula. Here in the US, our "law" let the Sackler Family promote addiction and then gave them a slap on the wrist while letting them use the "law" to reduce/avoid consequences.
China has more Rule of Law than the US right now.
Rule of law was thought to be a system where all citizens, including the rich, are protected from the government by due process, but rule of law is when the rich and powerful have limits on their arbitrary executions of power. Law exists to protect the weak from the powerful, law exists to bind power. In the west the rich have co-opted law as their tool.
> crippled by rules of their own making.
No, not our own making. The making of our richest. The rules in the west exist to solidify and cement the power of our richest and they use their money to pay for power consolidation giving them increasingly more power to compromise our laws for their interest.
China can do things because their power is working on behalf of their people, while in the west our power is working on behalf of the powerful.
> lack of bureaucracy
Who do you think is doing these things? Literally their bureaucracy. It requires people to organize and do those things. Bridges and tunnels don't get built without planning, funding, and execution, which is exactly what bureaucracies do.
The rich people in the west have been so effective at compromising institutions of power that "bureaucracy" is synonymous with "inefficiency." Their bureaucrats are trusted with the power to make things happen, while our elected officials bind their behavior and set them up for failure in order to justify privatizing their functions.
Not quite. You either don't realize or are overlooking how much implementation of the law in China, at every level, depends very much on who is doing the implementation. But the US under Trump is quickly heading down the road to where I can see it being worse than China in that respect.
> China can do things because their power is working on behalf of their people, while in the west our power is working on behalf of the powerful.
I can't disagree with your criticism of the West, but your statement about China is straight from a CCP propaganda handbook.
> China executed the executives that poisoned infant formula.
That was a long time ago, and obviously those executives didn't have the necessary guanxi.
Who gets accused and is found guilty of corruption in China depends very much on who is in power. That much was obvious in how Xi cleared out the opposition from 2013-2017. Bo Xilai is a prime example.
But back to the original topic of public transportation: That's one thing China gets right that the US is totally inept at because it's built on a car culture.
and? the Chinese people live and believe it. propaganda can be true, and governments can in fact live up to their statements. ofc with westerners' pathological mistrust of authority, as well as their penchant to pick the worst possible leaders, we will never come to any agreement about this.
also, are we seriously still unironically typing "guanxi" in this day and age? social capital is hardly something to be exoticized. keep the orientalist rhetoric where it belongs please.
some of them do; the well educated ones don't.
> propaganda can be true
except that it's not
I lived in China for years and am pretty well versed in life there under Xi and how the "rule of law" actually works there.
> unironically typing "guanxi" in this day and age
I left China in 2017 so it's _possible_ that things have dramatically changed since then, but from all accounts it hasn't. So it's not ironic because everything still runs on guanxi rather than on the rule of law.
The idea being that there is a gunaxi correlated "budget for corruption," but use of that budget comes with strings, and if corruption is engaged in, you are effectively signing a contract for results and that results forgives the corruption.
The mandarin first speaker who first said the idea didn't explain it exactly like that, but believed it completely and without question. The Cantonese first speaker who explained it more rigorously believed it in practice, but also that the corruption budget was far exceeding what was "planned" for creating crisis. Both asserted their own superiority to India, which also has a culture of corruption without a culture that demands results. Neither of them knew eachother.
Certainly when I heard that, my American ideological immune system was like "uh hu, that's certainly an interesting perspective." I was reminded of stories about how stringent military quartermasters are because it's understood that corruption is viral.
But it's hard to argue that China does not have results, long term thinking (kinda), and it appears to act on behalf of the public more.
Around the time of Hong Kong, I was fully on board with "Kantian universalize-able ideals restricting the actions of societies most rich and powerful" being a good definition for Rule of law, but since Trump round 2 in particular, I've come to analyze rule of law not by what it is, but what its outputs are supposed to be with the underlying assumption that any system that produces results must in some ways have structure that reflect Rule of Law.
Rule of law is when people, particularly leaders, subordinate to an idea/reality/reason rather than to a hierarchical structure/arbitrariness, so even if there is corruption consequences for failure and reward for success is rule of law-ish. I think that's even more visible when compared to the western standard of reward for failure and reward for success, more commonly stated as "rugged capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich" or "privatize profits and socialize risks."
Is that is not true here? What you stated is true of all hierarchical systems. The criminalization of "driving while black" in practice is an example of who is doing the implementation effecting law in America, and that is just one example out of many. The current head of the OMB said he wants to put government workers in trauma so that they do not have the resources to regulate big oil, on video.
> worse than China in that respect.
We are already there.
> but your statement about China is straight from a CCP propaganda handbook.
It is my external assessment from my own observations including significant amounts of talking with Chinese citizens. If you think I am a CPC propagandist, you can check my comment history where I assert that Taiwan is its own country many many times, and I am quite critical of many things, but if you want to have reality based assessments, it's clear that China can build things while the west generally cannot and it's clear China was right about the GFW (which implies a whole bunch of things Americans generally aren't ready to confront), even if what is said about the GFW is almost word for word the same out of Chinese people's mouths and very clearly propaganda.
> That was a long time ago, and obviously those executives didn't have the necessary guanxi.
I can't argue with that assessment, but it is also tautologically true based on how you define gunaxi. Regardless, there were consequences, while there are a dearth of any consequences for anything of our rich class in the US. We even refer to this immunity to prosecution as "the corporate veil," which appears to be nearly impenetrable in the US. The only time it seems to be penetrable is when another person of the same class is damaged.
> Who gets accused and is found guilty of corruption in China depends very much on who is in power
My core point is that we can't seem to find anyone guilty here. There are no consequences for the rich in the west. In the US the law is used as a weapon to create order while maintaining power hierarchies and not a system of using the states power against the powerful to promote justice. When Hong Kong was re-colonized by the Chinese, it was rule Rule of Law and the rights associated with it that became the academic argument for why those in Hong Kong are justified to protest extradition, and while at the time I found those arguments quite compelling. The degradation of the west and clear decline of democracy has turned the issue from what was clearly black and white at the time, to something that is much more grey.
If I ask which country has more corruption, I don't think the answer is very clear anymore, and if law is supposed to address corruption particularly at the highest levels, then it seems clear our notion of law is weak.
You mention CPC propaganda, but what about our own propaganda? If you analyze while assuming our own propaganda is true, western ideas make a lot of sense, but if you analyze ground reality, reality seems to be conflicting strongly with our propaganda.
> Who gets accused and is found guilty of corruption in China depends very much on who is in power. That much was obvious in how Xi cleared out the opposition from 2013-2017.
And yet my understanding is most Chinese (greatly influenced by the perceptions of those I interact with) believe that there was a successful crackdown on rampant corruption coinciding with a cross society economic uplifting. China is now a technological power house, and their innovation engine is now very much competitive, if not exceeding, our own.
What if those people cleared out actually were corrupt? What if they were like republicans who argue that the government can't work, and that's why they should be in power/their crony friends should get all the contracts? What if those people are doing as much damage to society as possible in order to justify new leadership? That's what's happening in the US and has been happening for 50 years.
So what looks like a black and white power grab, once you put those ideas in American terms, is much much less black and white.
> That's one thing China gets right that the US is totally inept at because it's built on a car culture.
These topics are related. Car culture is a function of the car industry's capture of the US government. China, AFAIK, wants to imitate car culture in order to not appear poor, but whether car company concerns or national concerns come first and how that gets navigated is materially meaningful to public transportation. Public transportation means less car owners, less car infrastructure, etc. It is unchecked power in the US that prevents our own infrastructure investments, because making those investments means challenging those who currently enjoy nearly unchecked power.
- yes, particularly under Trump the rule of law is being eroded; no question there. And there is systemic bias in the system here (i.e, driving while black, etc.) But it's not comparable with how the "rule of law" (which really should be called "rule by law") works in China. I know, I lived it for a number of years, owned a business there, was deeply immersed in the goings on, and many frank discussions with our circle of well educated Chinese (many of whom were emigrating or at least getting their kids out of the country).
> most Chinese (greatly influenced by the perceptions of those I interact with) believe that there was a successful crackdown on rampant corruption coinciding with a cross society economic uplifting.
Maybe the thinking has changed since I was there (left in 2017) but I can tell you without a doubt that the well educated class was not fooled by Xi's crackdown (which started a couple of years after he came into power). There's corruption everywhere--who got cracked down on (who certainly were corrupt) depended entirely on whose side they were own (much like Trump today). At the lower level, who gets the ax depends on the relationships they have with higher ups. Yes, in the US this happens to, but it's not at all the same level (until Trump--which is what's frightening about Trump).
Yes, the cross-society economic lift was real and greatly to China's credit. But that was not a result of some crackdown on corruption but rather a liberalization of the economy under Deng and continued by others especially Hu Jintao. I was there when Xi came into power and we all thought he was going to continue that, and instead after a couple of years it become clear he was going the opposite direction. That's when those who had the money and ability to leave started doing so, or putting together plan B's.
There is a faustian bargain whereby the middle class will support the government so long as there is economic growth (which is why the illusion of economic growth must be maintained). This is couple with extreme information controls and immediate crackdowns on any dissent, so that there is no opportunity to mount any resistance, and therefore "mei banfa", as the Chinese would say.
> I know, I lived it for a number of years, owned a business there, was deeply immersed in the goings on, and many frank discussions with our circle of well educated Chinese (many of whom were emigrating or at least getting their kids out of the country).
How predictable/arbitrary would you say the operating environment was?
Predictability suggests rule of law, while arbitrariness strongly suggests none. I'm not sure I would buy IP related examples as related to rule of law, and I would also likely try to distinguish between a hyper competitive environment between unequally resourced people and arbitrary executions of power, which I don't quite think are the same.
> faustian bargain
Timothy Snyder is my favorite political thinker, he recently wrote "On Freedom" and talks about "freedom from" vs "freedom to" at length. Money in many ways is freedom. If you don't have money you are not very free. So China getting richer, while in America Wages are stagnant and losing buying power year over year has implications for overall freedom. In many ways China is becoming more free and America less free if you think about "freedom to" and "freedom from" holistically rather than just "freedom from" which is a very American way of thinking about freedom. Chinese policy becomes a lot more defensible in terms of "freedom to" while it is completely indefensible in terms of "freedom from."
Where once I saw authoritarianism in China, now I ask how much of their behavior is actually an answer to the Paradox of Intolerance and how true the argument of the greater needs for ensuring order in a society at that scale (which from what I can tell is definitely propaganda used to sell it internally). Don't get me wrong, I completely see china as an authoritarian state rife with unchecked (and therefore arbitrary) power, but China is also functional in a way the US is very much not and that's become very interesting to think about, for me.
I'm interested in your analysis of China from a "freedom to" perspective.
> no opportunity to mount any resistance, and therefore "mei banfa"
Timothy Snyder calls this "the politics of eternity."
> middle class will support the government
Given what you've said so far, what does it mean for the middle class to not support the government? Consent is the core primitive of western political ideology and foundational idea of 'rule of law,' so the implication of withdrawing consent is certainly interesting.
There's no legal process, so the only option would be mass protests. Believe it or not, this does happen in China occasionally, but not in big cities like Beijing/Shanghai, and it's very quickly put down and not reported in the news (and social media reports are very quickly censored, though Chinese can find ways around this, often using very clever play-on-word techniques which the Chinese language is much better suited to than English; censors are on to it though so it's cat-and-mouse or whak-a-mole).
> I completely see china as an authoritarian state rife with unchecked (and therefore arbitrary) power, but China is also functional in a way the US is very much not and that's become very interesting to think about, for me.
I understand how that can seem appealing from a distance. Much like the way that people who don't live in the US look at it from a distance and think "land of opportunity" (which to be fair, for some people it has been). Live and work in China for years and you understand that the way it looks from the outside is not the way it is. China is no more functional than the US, and in fact, very much less so. The uncertainty created by the lack of a proper legal system is _not_ something you experience in the US. Case in point: We were pulled in by the police for failure to comply with some paperwork (paperwork that couldn't be complied with, a typical catch-22 situation in China that creates a grey zone in which businesses operate within the law but can at any moment also be considered in violation of the law if so deemed). Anything could have happened, from shutting us down completely, to a slap on the wrist. We were first told we had to shut down completely, but the higher up got a call from one of our well-connected Chinese friends and gave us a slap on the wrist instead (see how that works?). Except that the highest investigating officer said that he wanted to be a partner in our business and we ended up giving him 10% of the business to ensure that we didn't get pulled in again. Straight out of Don Corleone's playbook. This is quite common, and none of our Chinese friends were surprised (in fact, they advised us to go along with it, because it's just the way it goes (unless you have enough guanxi). For all its faults, this would not happen in the US (we'd sue).
This is just one example. But articles and books about China don't give you a proper idea of what things are like there because people visit for 3 months (or 3 weeks) and think they understand China. Or they spend 1-2 years there at a Chinese university, or living in an expat bubble, and think they know. Spend 6 years there embedded in Chinese society, and you'll quickly become disabused of your ideas about China.
I also pretty strongly disagree with your take on freedom. It's easy to say that because you don't live in an autocratic country, and neither has Snyder. I've spent years in two highly autocratic countries (China and Russia) and let me tell you, money itself is not freedom. What money does in those countries is buy you a ticket out.
After having lived on almost every continent in a range of countries under different governmental systems, I still agree with Churchill that Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
I don't believe in 'side-ism'. A crackdown on the GOP would be a benefit for the rule of law while it still being in a perilous position, while a crackdown on the DNC is very a much a prelude to destroy the idea of rule of law altogether.
Destroying the opposition isn't obviously bad. Referencing side-ism implies that removing all the nazis from your government is a bad thing because it gives non-nazis unchecked anti-nazi political power. I view that as a good thing if the definition of nazi reflects reality (like in germany) rather than unreality (like russia/urkaine).
It's bad. It's what turns a democracy into a dictatorship. And it's always for "good reasons" (by labeling the opposition as Nazi's/corrupt/criminals/etc.).
Now China was never a democracy, but the CCP was not monolithic and was somewhat democratic within the party itself -- except that is now gone.
Sometimes the label matches. There have been 4 people in high GOP positions who have sieg heiled. They aren't being labeled Nazis, they are objectively and factually Nazis. Germany's crackdown on the AFD is a response to power seizures/white supremacy in America. The GOP strategy writers literally wrote "there will be a revolution and it will be bloodless if the left allows it to be." There has very much been a declaration of "us or them", and that's not the type of thing that can be tolerated. You can't say "yes we'll work together with people who have said it's us or them."
Likewise your argument becomes a defense for pervasive systemic corruption, because the defense is no longer "we aren't corrupt," but "they're attacking us because we're the opposition, this is a power grab."
The gridlock that is a direct result of lack of corruption enforcement "because that would be a political power grab" became the mandate to overthrow the old establishment/ignore the constitution. What is happening in America right now is most influenced of all people by Merrick Garland who failed to prosecute a criminal because he was worried about enforcing the law against politicians which turns the justice system into a political weapon.
Unfortunately a weapon is just a weapon, it is a completely amoral object that amplifies the morality of it's wielder. Police officers carry weapons. It is not the weapon or that a weapon was used, but what the weapon is used to achieve that is worth analyzing.
That's the problem with side-ism, it implies that there are two equal sides with equal legitimacy and equal ability with equal strategies.
Game theory is deeply relevant, because on the two ends of the political spectrum are the cooperators (liberals) and people who think they should defect if they are able to win by doing so (conservatives). Conservatives don't cooperate when they should, and liberals don't defect when they should, and that's how those ideologies largely fail. Conservatives end up power grabbing (which is what I believe you're largely speaking in reference to) and creating dictatorship, while liberals fail to power grab and create dictatorship by ceding power.
On one hand you have people that are incapable of acting in their own best interest because of ignorance/illiteracy, which is largely the Chinese argument that justifies authoritarianism, which I find compelling because America is living through that right now. On the other you have authoritarians that are incapable of acting in any interest other than their own, while simultaneously no one is able to veto obviously bad decisions.
I think my problem with "absolute power corrupts absolutely" is that it says you should not seek out power because it will corrupt you, and I think that is a message that predators wish their prey to internalize.
Parents being authoritarians to their children is not automatically bad, although there is clearly good parental behavior and bad parental behavior, and I think the analysis of the behavior is much more interesting than the status as authoritarian, especially under current global conditions.
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?
[1] https://bus-routes-in-london.fandom.com/wiki/Hail_and_Ride_b...
I guess this is what you call "ride sharing". It is like your parents picking you up from football and realizing the kid from the other part of the town also needs a ride so they make a huge detour
That variability makes the whole system much less interesting once a change is involved, e.g. if the on-demand shuttle is only supposed to operate across the local area, but not for longer journeys traversing the whole city, especially if the connecting fixed-route transport runs less than every few minutes…
Or even without changes, but when you have some other external schedule constraints, because in those cases you always have to budget for the longer journey time, negating the benefit of direct routing somewhat.
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.
Now if we get Waymo style self driving minibusses, that'd be great. But if the running costs for full size electric busses aren't too dissimilar it might just make sense to standardize on larger automated busses for increased surge capacity.
Overwhelmingly however it's cheaper to vertically integrate, and private operators have no interest in taking low profitability routes (which can often be very important due to second order effects).
I will contend that automated busses might change things here a bit though.
No. The public transport authority keeps doing exactly the same that it's doing now. Simply, taxi drivers can choose daily to start following a route for shared drives. Nothing else, except maybe some coordination so that the ticket price is known in advance.
On a smaller bus line with less frequency than that, it will also not be really profitable for "independent" drivers.
It may be useful as a temporary solution or a local test but a public transport authority (should) have enough data to scale lines or create routes based on real usage.
When public transport are bad, it's rarelly due to the physcal constraints but always because budget is lacking. You aren't going to solve your lack of bus (drivers) by adding more vehicules with less capacity.
I'm told (but have no idea of how true that is, since my social circles don't intersect it) that New York has a cottage industry of private bus-vans, that sit somewhere between a taxi and a vanpool that get people (usually working poor) to and from work.
I'll concede geography limits are a valid reason for smaller vehicles.
They are also cheaper to buy, clean, and maintain.
I'm not sure the cheaper argument actually works out in other areas though. If due to peak capacity requirements you have to buy and operate two minibuses vs one full sized bus then that one full sized bus is going to be cheaper to maintain/clean/etc.
However if it's a low utilization route then for sure a minibus is a no brainer. Seems we see that model deployed in a lot of locations referenced above (excluding dollar vans etc, which I see more as a failure of the state tbh).
[0] https://citylimits.org/how-nyc-dollar-vans-are-adapting-for-...
Important to note that this was fully private and unregulated.
For example, in Scottsdale there are old-timey "trolleys" which look like streetcars, but they are just buses with fancy chassis. They operate routes which go through some neighborhoods and commercial districts, such as Old Town, to get people shopping and gambling and attending events.
In Tempe, there are "Orbit" buses which mostly drive through residential neighborhoods. They are mostly designed to get riders to-and-from standard bus routes and stations. You can also do plenty of shopping and sightseeing and day-drinking on these routes.
In Downtown Phoenix there is a system of "DASH" buses which, among other things, have serviced the Capitol area, which is due west of the downtown hub, where buses fear to tread, because it is also the site of "The Zone" where the worst street people congregate and camp-out.
Now all of these free circulators tend to be popular with the homeless, the poor, and freeloaders, but they are also appreciated by students and ordinary transit passengers, because we need to walk far less, and there are far more possibilities to connect from one route to another.
An innovative feature of many circulators is the "flag stop zone". Rather than having appointed stops with shelters, signs or benches, you can signal the operator that you wish to board or disembark, anywhere in the zone. The operator will stop where it's safe. While it is still a fixed route, it gains some of the flexibility for the passengers to make the most convenient stops.
Firstly, more people riding circulators equals more stimulation of the economy, via shopping and event-going. People getting out of their homes and out of their residential neighborhoods is an overall good for commerce.
Secondly, I believe that one of the issues for collecting fares is the reluctance to create a new tier. Because the circulators are not full-size, full-service bus routes, they would necessarily need to charge less fare, and setting that up and maintaining a lower fare tier is labor-intensive, and requires a lot of education of the public. If a bus runs around the neighborhood with EXACT FARE REQUIRED and people are out of quarters, well they're just going to forgo riding that bus. If a bus is fare-free, and gets them into the full-fare zone, they're going to go for it.
Edit: Bisrepita shared the info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_light_bus
In my experience, red tops can do almost anything they want -- they can deviate from the planned route in any way that they wish. Also, most only accept cash (is this changing?). Green tops are pretty strict about stops and accept cash or local metro card (Octopus). On a deeper, urban explorer level: The red tops have waaaaay more aggressive drivers. It feels like GTA sometimes.
When riding a mini-bus, you only need two words of local language (Cantonese) to make it stop: 有落 jau5 lok6 ("yau-lok"). (You need to really shout to be heard over the revving engine.) For green top routes, use Google maps. They will guide you on what green top to take. Example: If you want to go hiking in Sai Kung, take the 101M green top mini-bus from Hang Hau metro station to Sai Kung pier. (Google maps can provide directions with the bus info.) Red tops are more adventurous and should only be taken if you speak/read more than a few words of Canto (50-100 words is fine).
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.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love for this to exist. Just, as someone with optimisation experience, it seems pretty gnarly.
E.g. a bus route near where I used to live was frequent enough that you'd usually want to rely on it, but sometimes buses would be full during rush hour. Buying extra buses and hiring more drivers to cover rush hour was prohibitively expensive, but renting cars to "mop up" when on occasion buses had to pass stops would cost a tiny fraction, and could sometimes even break even (e.g. 4 London bus tickets would covered the typical price for an Uber to the local station, where the bus usually emptied out quite well)
Reliably being picked up in a most 10 minutes vs. sometimes having to wait for 20-30 makes a big difference.
I'm not sure what came of it; but I guess it didn't get adopted by the TfL so it never really became part of the transport system of the city.
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.
The introduction of randomised MACs might have put an end to it.
And you don't need 'there'll be a pickup within X minutes' because regular bus stops in a developed country already tell you all the buses that will come when. Some like 'Line 1, 2 min', 'Line 9, 5min' and so on.
And for your end to end journey, you can simply open the app and look up your whole journey when you are planning it. If you really don't want to wait a few minutes, you can get there on time.
> but semi-automatic based on where those on the bus (and waiting at stops) are actually going right now.
That's a solved problem with 'request stop'. If its in a city, 99% of the time you stop anyway. For less populated routes, the bus driver can just stop if somebody request its. Its an incredibly simple system that has worked for 100+ years. In Switzerland we even do this for rural trains and it works just fine.
The data companies actually need is this, what bus routes are often full and when. And based on that they can increase frequency.
For example in my city, the main bus line is already really large buses (120+ people) that run every 10ish minutes. And during peak times they run a few extra to increase frequency to 5ish minutes.
In a city, you can run 15min frequency even on the routes that go into the rural area, and for anything else you can do more then every 15min. That fast enough that additional on demand pickup doesn't make much sense.
The most important point is, don't ask people for data just because you want data. If people want to use the app to look up end-to-end journey or buy tickets, that's something you can use. But I sure as shit don't want to open an app anytime I get into a bus, tram or train.
So don't. But I want to have the ability to enter where I'm going and get the benefits of better service it could bring. I'm in London - I just tap in with a contactless card, but I'd very happily open an app and pick a destination if it meant I was guaranteed a timely pickup, especially for less well served routes.
I'm all for still letting people get on without indicating a journey; you'd just lose out on the benefits.
> And you don't need 'there'll be a pickup within X minutes' because regular bus stops in a developed country already tell you all the buses that will come when. Some like 'Line 1, 2 min', 'Line 9, 5min' and so on.
I do need that, because buses are regularly delayed, over full and skipping stops. Knowing what the current estimate is doesn't solve the problem.
This has been my experience in at least a dozen countries over the years. You can solve that with over-capacity, but it's incredibly expensive to do so and so won't happen most places. Being able to fix that problem at a fraction of the cost has clear benefits.
> And for your end to end journey, you can simply open the app and look up your whole journey when you are planning it. If you really don't want to wait a few minutes, you can get there on time.
I could. But my experience would be vastly better, if, when I've already looked up the journey, and pressed "go", like I often do with Citymapper for an unfamiliar route, I had a maximum wait for each of those routes.
Not least because if you do this, you could run routes with more dynamic schedule based on demand, and account for unexpected spikes.
> That's a solved problem with 'request stop'.
No, it is not. That tells you when to stop as long as you follow the regular route. If you have information on who is going where, you can dynamically change the routes.
E.g. a route near where I worked often had a very overcrowded leg between two stations. It'd often have served more passengers better to turn some of the buses around at either of those two stations. If you had better data on who were going where and how many people were waiting at other stations, that decision could be taken dynamically, and cars brought in to "mop up" to prevent any passengers from being stranded.
Requesting a stop does nothing like that.
> In a city, you can run 15min frequency even on the routes that go into the rural area, and for anything else you can do more then every 15min. That fast enough that additional on demand pickup doesn't make much sense.
15 minutes frequency is shit. It's slow enough it will cause people to make alternate plans. The routes I would want this on had 8-10 minute pickups and we still regularly ordered ubers for journeys we could do on the bus. The problem isn't when the bus is on time - if I was guaranteed the bus would always show up exactly on time, and never be full, 15 minues would be somewhat tolerable, but the problem is when a delay happens, and the bus that finally arrives is too full to take on passengers.
> The most important point is, don't ask people for data just because you want data.
If you think it is "just because I want data" you didn't get the point.
There is nothing about an app that can give you that guarantee. If the system cannot run their current schedule on time data on who wants to go where won't help them. They need to fix their operations to run on time. If their buses are full they need more buses, if they are skipping stops it is obvious that more people want to ride than there is room for without data on who that person is.
Your transit operator already has all the data they need. You need to ask why they are not acting on that data. I don't know if it is incompetence (that would be my expected answer in the US), or they lack the money to run more service. However either way the data they need exists and more data won't help.
Now if the transit operator is competent and has money: more data can help inform what is the best change of all options - but there are better ways to get that data than an app. An app is always limited to those who choose to install and use it (these days phones shut off installed apps that are not in use so you don't get data)
The system you advocate sound really good in your head, because an unknown non-existing system that magically sends a car to any place in 5min anywhere and transports millions of people reliability just sounds fantastic.
You don't see how complex this system would be and how instantly hard this would be to implement, and even if somebody did, it would be more expensive and less efficient, and provide less service and less capacity.
Additionally, most of the problem you complain about, already have known good solutions that could be implemented at far lower cost. And those problems are 100x easier to solve then the new system you are proposing.
And what I really don't understand, is why do you think an bad public transit agency that is already bad at running simple buses, is going to do much better if they had to run a, much more complex highly dynamic system. That is just a contradiction. Just do a simple thing correctly first, follow best practices, and then you can experiment some more with experimental stuff.
> E.g. a route near where I worked often had a very overcrowded leg between two stations
So this is already statically known then ... and all the needed data already exists.
> 15 minutes frequency is shit.
That frequency reliable and coordinated with anything else is for low population areas. If you believe in those areas, a public transport agencies would have cars just ready to pick everybody up, you are fooling yourself. That is just the kind of magical thinking you are talking about.
And 15 minutes is perfectly fine for quite a lot of places, many things in Switzerland run at 15min intervals, and its plenty for many things as long as its coordinated with everything else.
> The routes I would want this on had 8-10 minute pickups and we still regularly ordered ubers for journeys we could do on the bus.
You are likely quite wealthy, because most normal people do not order uber if there is a bus in 8min, even if they are sometimes late or a bit to full for your taste. Because if everybody did what you suggested, uber would be oversubscribed and massive surge pricing would happen and most people wouldn't get an uber, and then only after quite some time.
Since you seem to live in London I would just point out that Britain has done pretty badly on transit. For mostly dumb, tourist, reasons they are sticking with double decker buses. These are exactly the wrong solution for most routes. Slow ingress and egress in double deckers increases dwell times, and that's a killer as it leads to bunching and station skipping.
London is far to big a city for these tiny buses on all but a few routes into the outskirts. What they should use modern trams or something like this:
https://www.bus-pics.com/pics/_data/i/upload/2020/06/23/2020...
This can transport 120+ people and much more if you really pack in people.
And lines where this is overkill or not possible because of other constraints, level boarding electric/hybrid bus with many doors and a single level are the right alternative.
These are just some of the many issues with how London runs its system that leads to some of those problems you describe. I'm not an expert on London, but I'm sure people have written about this.
I have lived in Zürich and Berlin, and I have only once in my live skipped a bus or tram because it was to full (because of a fire at the train station). And Zürich has a 96-98% on time rating for buses and trams, and even higher if you account for how often you make your connection, I have only once in my live take an uber in the city, and that was at 3am. And Zürich is still considered a quite car oriented city, and doesn't have a metro like London, where buses and trams often run in traffic and and there are far to fewer bus lanes then there should be. Even some roads that have 4 lanes and run many buses still allows car on all 4 lanes for some dumb reason. But you can plan a reliable network even with that.
For a good general article going over many of these topics, this is a nice one and has some good further links:
https://marcochitti.substack.com/p/getting-bus-priority-righ...
And why should the bus driver care about this? You can get off the bus if it doesn't suit you.
(Who am I? Well why should I care to tell you that?)
1. removes control from local authorities - "we are supposed to decide for our citizens, not them"
2. NIMBYs will oppose the bus passing on their street - "too much noise, peoples, ..."
It is funny because nobody ever opposes Amazon or UPS trucks...
I think if we can get people to use a service, they won't oppose it?
Why do they get a say on buses? You don't get to veto other drivers even in front of your own house.
Flexible routes remove the mass from mass transit.
NYC has a paratransit system where you can essentially do something like this if you have a disability that stops you from taking the train (there's still lots of subway stops without elevators, etc). From my understanding it's nice in theory but borderline unusable given delays, ahead-of-time scheduling, and the endless gridlock in the city. So basically there to tick an ADA box...
You cannot combine fast, predictable and reasonable journey times with reasonable costs unless you have a scheduled service. If you want a chauffeured limo that is fine, don't pretend it mass transit or in any way better than a private car for anyone other than you.
One immediate problem that comes to mind is that you need a smartphone to take public transit. So if there's a teen without a smartphone, they can't take the bus, nor can someone who's phone died, etc.
One of the amazing things of the current system, as simple as it is, is that it's predictable and doesn't require coordination. You can walk to a bus stop and know that a bus will arrive and take you where you expect to go, same as the last time you've taken it and the time before that. You don't need to look up a map to see what today's route is, or to see where the stop is, or to let the bus know you're waiting for you. You just show up at the bus stop and the rest just happens in a predictable and reliable fashion.
Life in China these days does not support not having a smartphone.
Renting a shared bike, using a public Wi-Fi, ordering at a restaurant, literally everything requires an SMS confirmation now. There are even automated convenience stores that require scanning a QR code to enter. App-based mobile payments (Wechat/Alipay) is pretty much the only payment method ever used. Cash and cards are almost never seen.
I usually use Google Fi for almost all international travel (free roaming almost everywhere) but I need an additional local SIM in China because most of the SMS confirmation apps there only support +86 numbers.
I spent ~2 months traveling in Chongqing in 2023, most of the time without a SIM. You can get into most public wifis with a bit of scanning and mac spoofing. All public transport still accepted cash (or transit card) and was extremely cheap. Even if some shops no longer accept cash, there will always be ones that do. Not planning on going back anytime soon but if I ever do, I would not be a fan of requiring internet to deal with public transport.
For good or ill, most teens do have a smartphone on them, and even kids are often seen with smartwatches that have tracking, and probably WeChat, and every mall I've been to sells them. On the Shanghai bus and metro, people often use a Shanghai public transport card to pay, they do accept old fashioned cash though too. Powerbank rental networks are common on the street and non-returns default to purchases (~$14–$28 USD). Malls, and the Metro often has power available for free.
I.e. replace the bus stops with terminals/kiosks which give you full service, potentially another in the middle of the bus.
In many cities, the exact opposite of that has been true in my experience. I’ve waited at bus/train stops only for it to be 20+ min late or never show up multiple times per week. The unpredictability makes it infeasible as a means of transportation to getting to work or anything time sensitive (e.g., sporting event or show downtown). This is a much bigger problem in smaller cities with rudimentary public transit, but I’ve also experienced it in larger cities like Philadelphia.
I did also have this experience with the London underground during strikes, but it wasn't a surprise and we could still see when trains would arrive. So, much less unpredictable.
We spent 2.5trillion on the military last year. But the minute someone talks about putting money into things that benefit the general population it’s like “where’s the money for free healthcare come from, Bernie bro?” “Can’t give kids free lunch, they need skin in the game” “can’t have free education, something something bootstraps”
I feel very strongly that if a teenager is old and responsible enough to take the bus on their own, they are old and responsible enough for a smartphone. Furthermore, it's actively harmful to send your kids out into the world without the kinds of modern tools that would make them safer and more independent.
As for "phone died," well... just find a place to recharge it. It's not particularly difficult these days and I can't actually remember the last time my phone died on me when I needed it.
OP is a really cool demonstration of what we can do when everyone carries a computer in their pocket. Uber in the US has something similar with airport shuttles. Why should we handicap new, shiny things to make them usable without a phone?
(a) Not everyone has a (smart) phone.
(b) Not everyone can use a (smart) phone.
(c) Not everyone wants a phone.
(d) Not everyone can afford a phone.
(e) Not everyone wants to upgrade their phone to use the newest shiny things.
(f) Not everyone can upgrade their phone (see (d)).
(g) Not everyone opts to put (third-party) apps on their smart phone.
(h) Not all apps are built with accessibility in mind (see (b)).
(i) Some folks are concerned about mass surveillance (see (g)).
(j) Sometimes phones get stolen.
(k) Sometimes phones get broken.
(l) Sometimes phones get bricked.
(m) Sometimes phones get hacked.
(n) Sometimes phone get locked out.
(o) Sometimes apps stop working.
(p) Sometimes cell service goes offline (see Hurricane Helene).
(c) I own a cell phone, but NEVER leave the house with it (effectively a landline, but less expensive). When my city recently began requiring an app for public street parking, I simply stopped paying for parking (it's only a $16 fine, unless you are handicapped == free).
(e) The only thing that causes me to update my phone is when the battery swells up (typically around eight years). Otherwise I don't even update the original OS.
(g) Flat out, I refuse to use your app
(i) Whether by business/marketing or governments, agreed
Also, can't the bus system have a kiosk/terminal at certain locations? Can't there be a coin/bill acceptor on each block's single parking meter (e.g. Austin, Texas / UT campus meters)?
Recently I became a plaintiff (first time, small claims, no big deal); I was surprised to see that only pro se litigants can file paperwork with the court (i.e. lawyers MUST use the e-file system).
I attended medical school for one year, right before ACA/eRecords became a requirement... and this always seemed so invasive (e.g. sensitive/VIP psych documentation, PP).
I don't know where you get the idea that every single government program ever has to work for everyone - that's clearly not true and many useful programs are supposed to only serve a majority of people. Sewers are a great example of this.
That's a pretty bold claim, would love to see the data. The only thing I know that applies to the majority of the population is that they breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, and even with that claim I am not 100% confident.
[1] Daniel Defoe
[2] Ben Franklin
I find it amazing that people can be like "screw optimizing public services, saving the environment and make things more accessible for most people, I and some others don't like phones"
I plan to become plaintiff in my third civil suit against a mid-sized US city (this one: for requiring cell phone / app to park). I know this sounds petty AF, but I have plenty of free time to help correct this philosophical setback [app parking] with precedent. Dare I say to consider this `moral imperative` =D
During a civil action approximately two years ago (in a state Chancery Court), I had to sign an affadavid that "I don't use/have email" ... because Judge didn't believe me (a form `REQUIRED` it)!
I've filed most my court briefs using a typewriter, which is conversation-inducing (to say the least). As a pro se litigant, the courts are still required to accept paper copies =P
b: Then get someone nearby to help you, or improve phone accessibility.
c: Tough luck. You made your decision, now live with it.
d: I highly doubt this. Phones are basically free - and I'm not just talking about budget, cheap-o phones. You can find an iPhone X for $100! People literally give them away sometimes!
e: That's fine, the Uber app works on some pretty darn old phones.
f: See (e).
g: Installing a third-party app to use a third-party service is pretty uncontroversial.
h: The ADA requires this from transit providers. If you are so disabled that a phone or desktop or whatever can't be used, you probably are not making your own travel arrangements.
i: Then you should not be purchasing things online at all, or with a credit card.
j-n: So... you go a day or two without a phone, replace it, and then things work again.
o: Hopefully not if anyone is making money off them!
p: Would you call a taxi in a hurricane and be surprised when it doesn't reach you?
I realize that HN HATES the idea that things sometimes require phones. Unfortunately, sometimes things are only possible with phones for reasons that have almost nothing to do with profit.
If you choose to not have a phone, you can still take the bus. You can still call taxi dispatch on a landline. You just can't do this stuff conveniently, which seems like a fair tradeoff to me.
Which still is an option right now, where a lot of things haven't yet been app-ified, but if you follow "Why should we handicap new, shiny things to make them usable without a phone?" to the maximum, things could end up rather difficult in the future. Like if you've been commuting by public transport and public transport is no longer accessible without a smartphone, how would you continue going to work until the new phone arrives?
One of the most important principles of a public transport system should be that it's accessible to all in a lowest-common-denominator sort of way. Anything beyond that is also good to have, but if you don't have that basic level of accessibility, then it's not really a public transport system, it's a luxury transport system. And there are already plenty of luxury transport systems around.
Also, my last phone died on me fairly often, I don't think it's nearly as unusual as event as you're making it out to be.
Interesting. I think there's a balance to be had here. Making our kids "too safe" I think may lead to a lack of resilience. I'll certainly be teaching my kid how to read a map (orienteering), and I suspect the sense of autonomy and self-reliance they'll get from knowing they can get from A to B without needing GPS will be a very good thing.
That said, we probably will get them a dumbphone to put in the bottom of their bag for if they really get stuck. I have no plan to have tracking etc. though. No way.
These are incredibly user unfriendly locked gardens that are often adding gatekeeping to services that used to be ubiquitiously available, even in non-totalitarian systems, because suddenly you might need a bank account, an address, a government issued ID, a SIM card and a $100+ device that runs the approved stack just to take the bus.
In China, Korea and other places, a smartphone is already the required entrance ticket to public life.
It's a little bit like faulting sidewalks for assuming footwear.
I once asked an in-law what happens if your phone completely runs out of food and you're hungry. He (jokingly) replied "no phone, no eat".
I live in Shanghai. Many if not all kids have smart watches with payment apps.
People stop using it. Forget to cancel, unreliable service, took too long. As users drop wait times become longer, cascading failure.
Solution was real time dynamic rerouting and bus stop buttons to request the bus. But by then it was no longer wanted and canned.
It is a violent cartel, so certainly not a good thing across the board, but it's just an interesting variant.
It has been tried in many cities before like Beijing, Qingdao, Dalian, Hangzhou and Chengdu.
It wasn't a bad idea, it's just a good route gradually became a fixed route.
I guess I’ll add an example. Let’s say the minibus mainly goes from A to B, but pass through C in the middle. Dropping people off at C is often a non-trivial task that may takes a couple of extra minutes so you need to tell the driver in advance
- you have app, and you enter destination
- optimal minibus reroutes itself to pick you up and take you there with mix of walking, while dropping off other passengers too
- minimizes the door to door time that makes cars so optimal
It would be be rather far side for the bus to drop you off, let you walk, and then pick you up again 3 (european) streets over...in the name of 'efficiency'.
You request on app, and it sends you to a more central pickup/dropoff points
But in reality this would be used by 1 person. This route can then be cancelled if the service provider wants due to lower number of passenger(low cash flow).
Where I think it is most in use as a separate program is picking up elderly people. Retirement homes have minubuses picking up people and driving them to centrew and back. The users don’t have to abide by a busier standard bus schedule and the bus is more accessible by the elderly.
People will log into vote on their route when they want one, and then have essentially no reason to ever access the feature ever again. With no active users, there will be no way to get "votes" for a route.
I'm still keen to see automated trains in the future - such as the toob in London. We've had the technology for a long time now. So why isn't it possible that trains are routed on a per-carriage basis? If a camera + ML vision sees n people on the platform at 3am, it should be able to dynamically route and link carriages to serve the right number of people + some margin.
It saddens me that such cool/convenient things have been possible for years but that we have no interest in pursuing them since we're all in competition with each other to try to become billionaires. And the real billionaires aren't really interested in making less money.
ketzo•8mo ago
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.
amelius•8mo ago
MarceliusK•8mo ago
bluGill•8mo ago
ketzo•8mo ago
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)
bluGill•8mo ago
aeblyve•8mo ago
-- Mao Zedong
magic123_•8mo ago
I didn't follow closely but it looks like the project got canceled, as https://citymapper.com/smartbus returns a 404.