Bus stops here: Shanghai lets riders design their own routes
55 comments
·May 14, 2025ketzo
This is really brilliant — like desire paths, but for transit. Obviously execution will be challenging, but the concept is fantastic, and China/Shanghai seems like one of the few places with the requisite density & state capacity to actually make this work.
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.
zaptheimpaler
China is the only modern country that has both the capability and the lack of bureaucracy to just do things like this. It's simultaneously amazing to see and a depressing reminder of how badly western societies are crippled by rules of their own making. 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.
tw1984
> 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.
petesergeant
> 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
rrr_oh_man
Excuse my ignorance, but don't UAE/Qatar mostly use it to build malls and vanity projects? That's at least the media stereotype I have.
fakedang
The Roads and Transport Authority of Dubai is by far the best government authority I have ever interacted with, worldwide.
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.
petesergeant
There’s no shortage of malls in UAE, but also there’s fantastic infrastructure — great roads, a metro system, a country-wide rail system (open for cargo, opening for passengers soon). As for “vanity projects”, the Palm and both Burj’s are commercial projects that are also highly successful tourist draws. I can see an argument that the Abu Dhabi branches of the Louvre and the Guggenheim could be seen that way, but I think it’s fairer to see them as cultural investments.
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.
kr2
Chiming in from Los Angeles, USA to say wow, must be nice living in a modern society that prioritizes public transit and peoples' ease of movement. I know, I know, it comes with trade offs of living in an authoritarian state, but the absolute abysmal state of infrastructure in this country is maddening. Ever been on a train in Denmark or Japan or Switzerland?
jmcgough
Truly the worst of both worlds that we now have authoritarianism without good public transit.
chvid
I don’t see what this has to do with authoritarianism. If anything it is an example of the opposite.
sandworm101
Authoritarian regimes traditionally touted public transit. From "he made the trains run on time", the German autobahn (which actually predated a certain party) to the lavish halls of the Soviet subway stations, to China's highspeed rail networks, public transit is just a thing that strongmen like to do. And absolute power certainly helps when you want to plow a road/rail/bridge through a neighborhood.
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.
sampton
I don’t know. This check and balance thing is not exactly working out here.
olalonde
Los Angeles feels like countryside compared to Shanghai though.
chvid
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.
stickfigure
Mexico City has excellent public transit without the authoritarianism.
viraptor
So does Melbourne. (Yes you can nitpick lots of things, but overall it works and gets slowly improved)
kubb
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.
GrqP
Thank gawd for self driving cars…
sidibe
I hope the end state of self driving will be buses or vans doing on demand routing like Uber Pool is supposed to be but on a larger scale and maybe with fewer points for pickup and drop off.
riffraff
When I took an operations research class our teacher mentioned they had done a study on Rome's traffic and the best solution (optimizing for travel time etc) was mini-buses (~20 people) serving shorter routes.
Alas, nothing came of that study, and traffic in Rome has not improved in the incurring ~30 years.
dyauspitr
Now we just have incompetent, horrifically corrupt authoritarians hell bent on dragging us back to oil and coal.
parpfish
Tangent:
I’ve often thought that it would be great to let people design their own political districts to reduce gerrymandering
At the polling place you’d get a map with your census tract and then be asked “which two or three adjacent tracts are most similar to your community”. Eventually you’d end up with some sort of gram matrix for tract-to-tract affinity, and then you could apply some algorithmic segmentation.
Two problems:
- this is far too complex for most voters to understand, much less trust, what’s happening
- the fact it’s “algorithmic” would give a sheen of pseudo objectivity, but the selection of the actual algorithm would still allow political infouence over boundaries
viraptor
> 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.
abdullahkhalids
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.
abdullahkhalids
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.
agumonkey
I also wonder if it would be stable enough over time
permo-w
surely athen the census tracts would just be gerrymandered instead?
comrade1234
Train/bus services change every year here in Switzerland, but based on usage data rather than voting, which seems like it could be gamed.
chrisandchris
Routes actually don't change that much, is mostly the schedule. The article however is more about the route and less about the schedule.
rrr_oh_man
I love the Swiss approach to things. Possibly the only sane country.
softgrow
I'm glad that Shanghai has moved to the next level in public transportation in meeting customer demand. Most cities don't have the funds to buy smallish buses and labour available as drivers. They don't have the money or willpower to get frequencies to turn up and go levels (ie frequent) and leave people with long walks to widely spaced routes.
cryptoz
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.
moooo99
Law enforcement should not be a primary mean of funding for anything, as this creates a plethora of perverse incentives for lawmakers.
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
yanhangyhy
this is great. hope beijing will adopted this soon
informal007
This remind me that road router should be walked by passenger rather than designed by designers.
ars
Like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path
The moia service in Hamburg Germany offers virtual stops which is the next step I would argue. The bus follows a different route and stops every time based on the need of current passengers
https://www.hvv-switch.de/en/faq/what-are-virtual-stops/