There already is such a thing. That's why there are stop buttons in buses, at least in europe. Some less used stops are "on demand", the bus will only stop at them if you press the stop button before.
What you describe is basically just a taxi.
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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Fuck Cars
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Yes, I use those stop buttons, but sometimes 5 bus lines don't get enough use and just get closed down, but creating a line that goes through all those stops takes too long. Yes, it's a compromise somewhere between a taxi and a bus. I'm imagining single-user taxis, but there are countries where multiple users can occupy the same taxi. In that case I agree with you that it's similar to a taxi.
It is funny you can identify people proposing solutions to be from the US just by the attempt of solving a "non-problem", or a problem solved nearly everywhere else on the planet except for the US. Being home to the world's near entirety of energy trade, the earliest mass production of private vehicles, has a toll. The world's most faulty by design transportation systems.
Just looking at a US bus in comparison with buses anywhere else (like a 20 ton truck trying to move 2 tons a mile away) or even a schoolbus, tells you there is something seriously wrong here. So a stranger to the US tends to ask, who tried to solve whose problem here and ended up with this monstrosity.
There are people in Europe/EEC who work full time and make less than it costs an average "worker" in the US to go from home to work and back. And I am not talking about personal costs but general social cost.
I can tell you that there are also places in Europe where the public transportation network is as hopeless as in the US outside major cities. These are the abandoned countryside regions in Spain, Eastern Europe, some parts of England (coincidentally, the ones who voted for Brexit).
Eastern Europe, especially post-soviet countries have Marshrutkas, which are a cross between a bus and a taxi. Very similar to what you describe here.
True, I've ridden in those vans in Moldova and Romania, but it wasn't clear if they had a fixed route.
As long as there are still buses on regular scheduled routes with timetables its cool. Having to pick someone up who lives in the boondocks can be annoying when you are one of the other passengers. It's nice for the driver and passengers to be on a predictable route, making arrival time relatively easy to schedule, and it's nice for the driver to not have to futz around looking for passengers waiting in stupid locations, or who cancelled last minute.
I think it's best to keep these as speciality services. For instance, I sometimes use such a bus to get to the airport. You reserve a seat a few days in advance, the taxi company running the service figures out the most efficient route based on the customer locations, their flight times and probably some other stuff like expected traffic etc. and will then run the route on the day you need to be there. For this it's great, but might as well just use shared taxis or regular public transport for everything else.
Buses are efficient due to a fixed route. Having an empty bus (save, yourself) run around erratically will defeat this efficiency, essentially becoming a large limo.
Usually the bus would not circulate empty and conversely I've been on fixed bus routes where there were 3 passengers, so what you are saying is very debatable, the key here is flexibility. The flexibility of on-the-go bus route rerouting has huge potential for lower density areas like suburbs or off-peak hours or as a complementary service, but I'm willing to listen to counterarguments to this.
You can't be "fuck cars" and simply tell people who don't live in cities to get fucked, you need to present alternatives and this is a start, maybe with smaller buses or vans, depending on live demand estimates.
Depends on how you run it; rather than a full bus, you can have a smaller minibus, and run it with a fixed destination point in mind (e.g. a hospital). It can also be used to help capture demand, so that a more effective static bus timetable can be put together.
Dallas already has this, it's called GoLink.
They have this service in Timaru, New Zealand which is a relatively low density town / city of less than 30,000 people. They use vans / minibusses and use the same software to dynamically plan the best route to pick up the passengers that book via the app (or by phone) and drop them to their destinations in the most efficient way possible. You may have to walk to the end of your street for pickup. If there are ever times when there aren't any passengers the van isn't trundling endlessly around in circles doing nothing but waste fuel. I assume it works best in situations / areas where there aren't that many public transport users and on high volume routes they can retain traditional fixed lines alongside the on-demand solution with people using whichever service works best for them. Timaru ended the last fixed route service early this year and have gone full on-demand only.
I'm pretty sure this is satire, right? Haha, it's got to be. Will upvote once confirmed
Not satire, I'd use this service if I had access to it.
Sorry meant to comment on @ggleblanc@kbin.social's comment. Moved there. I'd definitely use this as well!
First you have to define the problem you want to solve then attempt to present a solution. You appear to want to serve the ultimate in convenience and service to a passenger, to have the passenger to do less walking, less waiting, while still be "economically feasible". For who? For everyone? If we all had limo service but not dedicated, we agreed we can all share limos, all passenger vehicles would be taxis and a significant part of the workforce were limo/taxi drivers, but we would have less cars on the road. Can we afford this as a society or is it going to be just for the few that can, and the rest would walk?
Minibuses and minivans end up being less efficient than anything else. In countries where cabs are allowed to pick up 2-3 different passengers if they find someone down the road going in the same general direction, end up with passengers avoiding to get on someone else's cab due to the routing, time, and ending up with about the same cost. There are 7-9 passenger minivans, imagine all going to different places and imagine being in the back and having to get out. Even small buses on local satelite routes end up being very costly due to single door multiple stop routes. EVERYONE wants to be next to the door and not have to rub and push people to get out.
Trains, multicar trains with more than 45' between stops, are extremely efficient. Small local trains and metro/subway is much more costly pass/distance than trains. Fewer cars, exponential energy cost, tremendous infrastructure. Large buses beat small trains overall, in urban environments. (Raising a train on ramps over the roads costs 2-3 times more than having them on street level. Putting them undergroun on an already built city costs 2x more than raising them up. Trains take an enormous amount of energy to accelerate to cruising speed, little energy to maintain it, and another huge amount of energy to stop them again (mostly heat realeased, little generator energy recovered). To have them accelerate and stop as frequently as bus stops they become as costly as passenger cars.)
Cycling for able bodied passengers in a priority to cycling transport system beats everything. Just a video clip of Holland urban centers is proof of concept.
So what is the problem you are attempting to solve?
The question is: how to provide efficient public transport to lower-density suburbs? Hint: it's not trains and it's not individual vehicles or bikes either.
Low density suburbs are a US thing, where chaotic lack of urban planning allowed people to spread out to cheaper land to build a home while passenger cars and fuel were in abundance and cheap. Compare an urban suburban area in Germany, where the majority of population lives in satelite villages (higher density little towns) served by one or two train stations in proximity to ride to the "city"/workplace of industrial center.
This US peculiarity was formed by policy controlled by the oil and auto industries, and their puppets politicians serving their interests alone, or risk never get re-elected. You can't design a transportation system to match chaos in all other respects. It may be too late to think in terms of efficiency how to cure US pathology. It is deep embedded in US lifestyle.
Rural Europe may not have adequate public transport but by historic evolution, farmers, owners and workers, lived in the center of an agricultural area, small town, small lots, marketplace centered in the middle of the town, and transportation needs were those of going to land and back. There was always a way to do so, animals, carriages, tractors, even buses in some respects. Expanding urban centers and lack of affordable housing had people either move to such towns or find work from such towns to the city, and this created new problems and challenges. Either a box like bed-sheet efficiency in the urban slams, or a decent small house in a village 1hr away.
I can't say there are no problems outside the US, it is just that many problems of the US are only in US and exist because of special industrial interests fully represented by government against ALL interests of public nature. Housing, food, health, energy, transportation, education, are intentionally disorganized and problematic in the US, as commodities regulated by cartels of industrial interests alone. An example of this collision of paradigms is the attempt by the US to parallely form two agreements as market/trade of N.Atlantic and one in Pacific rim. New Zealand, being geographically isolated from the rest of the world, deep South in the vilent south pacific, had created a domestic pharmaceutical industry for every drug it is considered essential. To open up to a free world market and allow it to go bankrupt, the chance to have to depend for imports for pharmaceuticals was by no means in the table for negotiation. The US members pushing for the agreement thought of this reaction as extreme as radical communist reaction to "open market".
Neither of these agreements have gone too far as far as I know or read recently. Various similar problems, the covid pandemic, brought new variables in the table the US had taken for granted that it is "common sense" for the entire planet that an open market should not be intervened or challenged by any government, by any interest group, by any humans! So we can't really talk about US totalitarian neo-liberalism when there is still evidence of resistance and anti-American sentiment in the world. It is too early for humanity to adopt to Hollywood fantasies and AI.
Instead of fantasizing look up the most successful real life examples. Train/metro stations far apart leading downtown, then suttle buses radially serving those stations. You hop on the suttle bus to the rail station, which speeds and gets you downtown, or interconnects with an urban rail system. This would have worked if towns were designed as workplaces (whether office areas as you have in silicon valley) or industrial areas concentrated geographically. But given the chaos of lack or urban design in the US there is no convenient system to be serving geo-chaotic needs of people living "anywhere" and working anywhere. Basically people are pushed to adopt to chaos by locating work close to a rail/bus line and housing along the same.
The attempt is almost as saying being stubbed in the back everyday at work is normal, what we need is a remedy and patch to fix the wound quickly so you can go back to work and getting stubbed in the back. My reaction is fix the problem of getting stubbed instead of trying to conceive a disinfecting patch.
Bikes aren't bad in suburbs. They're maybe not great for commuting, but they can handle most errands. Groceries, school, etc.
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