> Had this really not been done before? Apparently not on land. Ferries are an ancient idea, both for crossing water bodies and for traveling along them. They are fixed routes, of course, but that’s mostly because the shore is fixed. Pascal’s idea was that even though carriages could go from anywhere to anywhere on Paris’s street network, a special kind of usefulness would arise if they didn’t do that, but instead followed paths that people could remember and plan around.
While not exactly a transit system, there were fixed trade and courier routes before this where the dependability and consistency induced build up and improvements around the route. There were probably even times and places you could hitch a ride on someone's cart or group up with others for safety because of how well the routes were used.
The site seems to be under heavy load, so I couldn't see it all. But it seems this map only contains city networks, and not regional networks. The regional bus networks in France are really quite weak, infrequent and don't connect well, even with the now larger régions.
If you're traveling to or interested in Paris and its history, I really enjoyed "Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris" by Graham Robb. Has some good, accessible and entertaining history relating to (among other things) the construction of the metro.
That's not a surprise. People orient their lives around what they can do. Thus, things like this become self-fulfilling prophecies. You build it, they come, they add the demand, so you keep it running. It certainly does and has happened that cities have changed majorly at various times because of changes in transit, but it's not particularly common. In most cities even where transit has been torn out, you can see where the lines used to run because that's still a high demand corridor today.
Im sorry i disagree, boats have been running up and down rivers or seas and oceans for thousands of years if not longer. The river is the route, its fixed.
Pretty sure if we went back in time with a time machine, Egyptians and others have been buying passage up or down or maybe both ways the Nile.
This is something so obvious it cant possibly be true.
> Frequency ranged from 7.5 minutes to 15 minutes, so these came often enough that people could just go out and wait for them, not worrying about a schedule'
Most European and East Asian major cities do have that. A train every 2-5 minutes during busy hours. In smaller cities (below one million people or so), a train / bus / tram every 10 minutes is probably most common.
You need some combination of high-ridership and low-personnel-cost. You can get that in most of Europe and Asia, but incomes in North America are quite high and labour capture is high too. Most jurisdictions cannot afford the drivers necessary at high frequency because there isn’t enough density for it.
Skytrain bypasses this by not having drivers and perhaps as buses become AVs we could add many more of them here in the Bay Area with much higher frequency.
You could do it in most American cities. You would need to remove car infrastructure to do it. Bus Rapid Transit with protected lanes and median platforms along major arterials is a method most American cities could absolutely support. Some cities might be a stretch, Houston's nightmare sprawl for instance. But I'd put money on it being feasible in 70-80% of cities.
You need a state or other body committed to fixed routs and seeing their long term benefit. The American ideology that public transit must directly support itself with revenue is what has resulted the miserable transit system that we see today.
Edit: I should add that the ideology of transit supporting itself also corrodes the key idea of fixed, scheduled routs, high-lighted in the article. I know in the US that even if a town I'm happens to currently have a decent public transit system (an occasional though uncommon occurrence) I know it will be crap in a couple years as revenues fluctuate since local transit is a political football, so I'd never count on public by selling my car or other decisions.
In Dallas TX our lightrail runs about every 15 min too. It's works pretty well and is big enough to be actually useful. I like to use for big events when you know parking is going to be a nightmare or expensive. It's slower than a car though, the trip about doubles in terms of time taking the train vs driving.
On a lot of London Underground lines, 5 minutes is considered poor service in rush hour. Every 2 minutes is required to handle the sheer volume of passengers
If I were to speculate, I'd say that perhaps it might only be feasible in small & dense cities with low traffic, as such high frequency requires a lot of resources.
Was born in a small city with frequent public transportation (5-10 minutes for most routes). As I moved to larger & more congested cities, public transport became less convenient and the schedule more erratic.
Definitely not only small cities. Only dense cities maybe, but I'm not sure that the causality link is in the direction you present: big european cities are dense in part _because_ of public transport. They couldn't be so dense without it, you'd need much more car infrastructure (roads, parking lots) which already decreases density, and people would more readily live further out given they'd already need a car anyway.
Tokyo manages a very tight schedule and they're enormous, so it can't only be scale that matters. And how do you fund effective transit in a smaller city with less of a tax base?
In Sydney we are very close to Asia so the shame of our rotting train system finally caused the city to invest in modern driverless underground transit, termed 'the metro'. I believe planning began in the 1990s and it only really launched about 5 years ago, so 20 years or so in the making. This system is much faster, cleaner and more modern than the older surface rail, largely helped by the fact it's way underground in most sections due to a lack of surface land availability. However, it frequently stops or requires maintenance and is run by a totally separate bureaucracy than the rail system, who apparently refuse to communicate despite having shared stations. This leads to situations such as one encountered this weekend whereby the rail operator had track work scheduled on a major section of their route, and simultaneously the metro system had disrupted service, such that a great number of passengers were stranded. More importantly, even when it is working they do not coordinate arrival times, such that it is exceptionally common to arrive on one mode, where the platform faces directly the other mode, but it has just departed. 30 seconds of scheduling either side would greatly increase efficiency, but it's nobody's department. This is the sort of thing they do perfectly in Japan, but Australia is a country of 1000 little scams with everyone fervently minding their own scam. We urgently need to replace corrupt humans with AI.
"More importantly, even when it is working they do not coordinate arrival times, such that it is exceptionally common to arrive on one mode, where the platform faces directly the other mode, but it has just departed. 30 seconds of scheduling either side would greatly increase efficiency, but it's nobody's department."
> This is the sort of thing they do perfectly in Japan, but Australia is a country of 1000 little scams with everyone fervently minding their own scam. We urgently need to replace corrupt humans with AI.
Have you even see how sad people in Japan are ?
Go watch a few youtubers travel around Japan and tell me what you see ?
I only see kids to adults to seniors ALL going to school or work.
Why are tehre almost no people having a day off ?
Now you know why they have those gates on trains, they are too stop people jumping...
Judging by the rest of the replies (most of which I'd agree with), it seems more uncommon that they do not, than they do :) I think this heavily depends on how friendly your government in general is to public transport, which can vary heavily if you're in some specific places in the world.
I don’t think that there was much fixed scheduling for water transport prior to the the development of steam engines either, because you were usually at the mercy of the winds and the tides.
Rowing was common and well known. Many ferries cross rivers where tides and the wind are not concerns. Winds near shore are often consistent enough to have near fixed frequency routes.
Ancient Mediterranean maps often reveal ferries and such were not going vast distances but rather they would go from small settlement to small settlement. This would be much smaller boats that could be easily rowed and, in turn, have relatively fixed frequencies. The small boats could get into ports that would be impossible to put a large ship into. As ships grew larger and sailing became more popular, longer distances would happen and then winds and tides would be more important.
“Trekschuit (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈtrɛksxœyt] ⓘ; lit. 'tug-boat', i.e. 'tugged boat') is an old style of sail- and horse-drawn boat specific to the Netherlands, where it was used for centuries as a means of passenger traffic between cities along trekvaarten, or tow-canals.
[…]
By 1700, an extensive network of trekschuit- and ferry services linked all of the important cities in the coastal provinces of the Netherlands. Travel by trekschuit was reliable, comfortable, and cheap. The speed was about 7 km/h, which was faster than walking, and more comfortable than by coach. Many foreigners praised the advantages of the system, leading to the introduction of canals, such as the Erie Canal, in the United States. The boats were pulled along by horse on a towpath (in Dutch called jaagpad, named after the jager (chaser) which accompanied the horse)”
Scheduled sailings were common in the Roman world, and some medieval European economies. It helped keep ship sizes small when merchants could anticipate the fixed schedule.
The Carosses à cinq sols was not just an idea but a startup proper; Pascal invested most of what he owned for a sixth of the business, which turned out to be a great investment.
The main idea behind it was a kind of time share. At the time, only the (very) rich could afford to own and maintain carosses and stables with 6 to 10 horses in crowded cities like Paris; it was a truly revolutionary idea that a company would own the cars and the horses, and the general public would pay only for the time traveled.
Then the other genius idea, of course, was fixed routes and predictable schedule, as explained in the post. People actually objected at first that it would be stupid (and ruinous) to have empty carriages going from one place to another instead of chasing customers like a modern cab. But that was the whole point.
> Had this really not been done before? Apparently not on land. Ferries are an ancient idea, both for crossing water bodies and for traveling along them. They are fixed routes, of course, but that’s mostly because the shore is fixed.
Historically, not true for the “trekschuit” in 1632. For that, the shore didn’t exist before the route was envisioned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trekschuit:
“The first trekschuit 'sailed' in 1632 between Amsterdam and Haarlem and could carry 30 passengers. The trekvaart or canal was dug in a straight line to facilitate an easy pulling process and to guarantee the shortest route”
My late grandmother once told me this is how she travelled longer distances on occasion as a youth/young woman. Was a good lesson for me in understanding exactly how much she had seen the world change in her lifetime.
As an aside, the book "How Paris Became Paris" mentions Pascal's invention among many other that Paris was first with: elevated sidewalks, city lights, and more for any urban geeks.
Regarding public transport route design, I've long wondered how much efficiency current routes in a given country might be leaving on the table.
As in: if one collected sufficient anonymised travel data to offer a reliable understanding of the population's travel needs, and given the fixed constraints of the existing road and rail network, and the existing number of buses and trains, how much more efficient could the network be by varying routes, timings, stops, and interactions?
Imagine if such a dataset was made available, and a prize offered for the best solution.
The challenge could also be extended to explore optimal areas for investment in additional infrastructure - a wider road here, a new roundabout or branch line there.
The best answer for many problems, is to avoid the action in the first place. Just because you can do it doesnt mean you should do it, and public transport is mostly thought to serve commuting.
A lot of people commute for hours to sit at a computer...which means they could work at home.
Pretty much all large public transit authorities already collect all sorts of data about requirements and usage, and have scientists/engineers on payroll to optimize the network within the economic and political constraints these systems operate in.
I know my city has that data, but it doesn't help if you optimize for the wrong thing. AFAICT the highest priority is that "everybody has to be within 3 blocks of a bus stop", resulting in serpentine routes the article decries.
Not much. People plan for the lowest common denominator. If service levels surge during certain days or hours that's great, but people don't want to get burned by a period of thin service. Imagine if Fedex said overnight mail could no longer be delivered on Thursdays in certain towns. You'd have to remember to check if today's Wednesday and if the recipient's town is a low service zone. Or you could just switch to a more consistently available network like UPS.
Most transit is already biased to the 9-5 with thin nighttime service. As such most people uber back from the bar than wait for the 30 min owl bus service.
The interesting thing with transit is that optimal may not be the most optimal. E.g. your model might suggest half mile stop frequencies. Seems good, until the public comment period and all the old folks who take the line show up and ask their particular stop not be displaced.
There is a reason why a lot of american bus networks basically follow the same old streetcar routes that were always there. People become used to existing patterns and build lives around them. New transit is a good opportunity to apply this model, but reworking old transit is tricky because some of your existing ridership will end up with a worse offering by definition, and they will protest. While the people who might benefit will not show up with equivocal advocacy in the public comment meeting.
The bus stop spacing problem is very real. Buses stop every other block in my area. The average speed end to end is no faster than riding a bike! If you suggest deleting some stops people scream about their own convenience or pretend to care about the disabled. By trying to cater to every single constituency, we've designed a bus route that serves no one's interest. A slow bus might not exist at all. People will just buy a car, going into high interest debt if need be.
I live in Helsinki, where there is a good tram and bus network. Every now and again a major road will be dug up, in the city center, and trams often get rerouted for a few months to work around that.
I've noticed that there are some diversions which are definitely beneficial to me. There are busses from my house to the city center, as well as a tram. If the tram diverts to a different destination that essentially doubles my available "travel destinations" in a way that's really useful.
So no doubt, for me personally, there are changes that could be useful. But perhaps they would be less useful for others.
You might explore "gray" semi-formal bus networks. Where the on-the-table gap is sufficient to fund businesses. And where the efforts to shut them down, provide insights into mechanisms, incentives, and interests, around that inefficiency.
due to how hard it is to change the networks, I think there's a lot of inefficient route design. if you look at SEPTA in Philadelphia, they're in the middle of realigning a lot of their bus routes for the first time in 60 yrs and ridership has increased noticeably since they started.
Well, there is some of that. It's not near as much as you might guess. Predictable transit is very helpful because people plan their life around it. What the data you're looking at will show where the bottlenecks are, and yes, you can remove a few bottlenecks and make people's life a little bit better, but it's not going to be a major change because of major change will not show up in the data until well after it's made.
I don't remember the terms used, but I've seen data sets of where people live and work in Manhattan, and you do see people who live on subway lines take jobs on that same line, and they don't take jobs on a different subway line that while possible is overly inconvenient.
people have already arranged their life around the existing transportation that exists around them. They are not going to change their life because it is already in place. They want bottlenecks fixed but otherwise don't really need a change to their life. Even if a change would greatly benefit them, they often can't see that and wouldn't imagine themselves making the change to their comfortable life.
The real value of transportation experts is they can look at a map and all your data and say, if we make these changes, over 20 years, the city will redevelop in this way, and then we can ask questions. "Is that how we want the city to develop?" however, the data is never going to show that because the data shows what people are doing today, not what they're going to do in 20 years. Don't get me wrong, experts get this wrong too when they make predictions. However, there is a lot of things we can use to inform our predictions. even though we're not perfect, we can make predictions that are usually right.
Varying the route timing is the absolute worst thing you can do. People need to depend on your transport system. If they have to look at a schedule that's going to change by day to figure out when they can actually get somewhere, they're going to get frustrated and start looking up for an alternative that they control. If you vary your timing at all, it's only because you're changing between a train every minute to train every five minutes. You don't get to go any farther apart than that without losing writers because they no longer can trust that the system will get them there when they want to be there. Physics puts a lower limit on time. I believe the current record is a train every 90 seconds, and I'm not sure how much closer together you can get. The limit for a bus is three minutes apart and even that is extremely hard.
Transit systems that are running worse than 5 minute frequencies have large drops in ridership and as they increase frequency: ridership jumps because people start to use, they can always just go out when they're ready to go. If this wasn't so expensive, everyone in the world would be running 5-minute frequencies all day.
about ferrys. Douglas Adams let one of his protagonists in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency postulate that the book of revelations was the product of despair waiting for a ferry
Two things can be true at the same time. Pascal was certainly a prodigy, but he was also largely living off family wealth and could afford to not specialize.
> Had this really not been done before? Apparently not on land. Ferries are an ancient idea, both for crossing water bodies and for traveling along them. They are fixed routes, of course, but that’s mostly because the shore is fixed. Pascal’s idea was that even though carriages could go from anywhere to anywhere on Paris’s street network, a special kind of usefulness would arise if they didn’t do that, but instead followed paths that people could remember and plan around.
While not exactly a transit system, there were fixed trade and courier routes before this where the dependability and consistency induced build up and improvements around the route. There were probably even times and places you could hitch a ride on someone's cart or group up with others for safety because of how well the routes were used.
there were already post carriages but they were not inner city
Well he'd be proud to see the extend of the fixed routes network in France today : https://cartes.app/?style=transports#6.32/47.811/2.097
Each blue polygon is a network. Zoom to see the lines.
Of course we should do way better, and unify all that with a single ticket and single website for route planning.
The site seems to be under heavy load, so I couldn't see it all. But it seems this map only contains city networks, and not regional networks. The regional bus networks in France are really quite weak, infrequent and don't connect well, even with the now larger régions.
Yes it's almost constantly under heavy load from illegal LLM indexers.
You can see regional coach networks by clicking "car", it means coach bus in French.
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It occurs to me looking at the map that a tourist in modern day Paris would still be well-served by this network.
That thought also made me wonder how central Paris' modern metro system overlays onto this. Here's a quick little visualization: https://stirring-biscotti-a978fa.netlify.app/
If you're traveling to or interested in Paris and its history, I really enjoyed "Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris" by Graham Robb. Has some good, accessible and entertaining history relating to (among other things) the construction of the metro.
That's not a surprise. People orient their lives around what they can do. Thus, things like this become self-fulfilling prophecies. You build it, they come, they add the demand, so you keep it running. It certainly does and has happened that cities have changed majorly at various times because of changes in transit, but it's not particularly common. In most cities even where transit has been torn out, you can see where the lines used to run because that's still a high demand corridor today.
Im sorry i disagree, boats have been running up and down rivers or seas and oceans for thousands of years if not longer. The river is the route, its fixed.
Pretty sure if we went back in time with a time machine, Egyptians and others have been buying passage up or down or maybe both ways the Nile.
This is something so obvious it cant possibly be true.
> Frequency ranged from 7.5 minutes to 15 minutes, so these came often enough that people could just go out and wait for them, not worrying about a schedule'
If only most cities could have this today
Most European and East Asian major cities do have that. A train every 2-5 minutes during busy hours. In smaller cities (below one million people or so), a train / bus / tram every 10 minutes is probably most common.
Perhaps the poster is in the US where frequent-schedule public transit is a rarity save in a few select cities.
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You need some combination of high-ridership and low-personnel-cost. You can get that in most of Europe and Asia, but incomes in North America are quite high and labour capture is high too. Most jurisdictions cannot afford the drivers necessary at high frequency because there isn’t enough density for it.
Skytrain bypasses this by not having drivers and perhaps as buses become AVs we could add many more of them here in the Bay Area with much higher frequency.
> You need some combination of high-ridership and low-personnel-cost.
Driverless (GoA3) and completely unattended (GoA4) rail operation is possible, which could help with personnel costs:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation
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You could do it in most American cities. You would need to remove car infrastructure to do it. Bus Rapid Transit with protected lanes and median platforms along major arterials is a method most American cities could absolutely support. Some cities might be a stretch, Houston's nightmare sprawl for instance. But I'd put money on it being feasible in 70-80% of cities.
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No you don't.
You need a state or other body committed to fixed routs and seeing their long term benefit. The American ideology that public transit must directly support itself with revenue is what has resulted the miserable transit system that we see today.
Edit: I should add that the ideology of transit supporting itself also corrodes the key idea of fixed, scheduled routs, high-lighted in the article. I know in the US that even if a town I'm happens to currently have a decent public transit system (an occasional though uncommon occurrence) I know it will be crap in a couple years as revenues fluctuate since local transit is a political football, so I'd never count on public by selling my car or other decisions.
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Most big European cities run trains every 10-15 minutes and every 5 minutes during rush hour.
In Dallas TX our lightrail runs about every 15 min too. It's works pretty well and is big enough to be actually useful. I like to use for big events when you know parking is going to be a nightmare or expensive. It's slower than a car though, the trip about doubles in terms of time taking the train vs driving.
Maybe the capitals and major metro ones. My tier-2 EU city is has commuter trains every hour and every 30 minutes at rush hour.
Yeah it sucks, making car commutes the way better alternative.
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On a lot of London Underground lines, 5 minutes is considered poor service in rush hour. Every 2 minutes is required to handle the sheer volume of passengers
If I were to speculate, I'd say that perhaps it might only be feasible in small & dense cities with low traffic, as such high frequency requires a lot of resources.
Was born in a small city with frequent public transportation (5-10 minutes for most routes). As I moved to larger & more congested cities, public transport became less convenient and the schedule more erratic.
Definitely not only small cities. Only dense cities maybe, but I'm not sure that the causality link is in the direction you present: big european cities are dense in part _because_ of public transport. They couldn't be so dense without it, you'd need much more car infrastructure (roads, parking lots) which already decreases density, and people would more readily live further out given they'd already need a car anyway.
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Tokyo manages a very tight schedule and they're enormous, so it can't only be scale that matters. And how do you fund effective transit in a smaller city with less of a tax base?
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Isn't it the opposite? Larger city -> denser population -> more public transport demand -> better public transport?
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This exists in many cities. See Bus Rapid Transit and many rail lines. Seattle's network has many instances of this.
Seattle has instances of it, but there are still many parts of the city not well connected by transit.
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In Sydney we are very close to Asia so the shame of our rotting train system finally caused the city to invest in modern driverless underground transit, termed 'the metro'. I believe planning began in the 1990s and it only really launched about 5 years ago, so 20 years or so in the making. This system is much faster, cleaner and more modern than the older surface rail, largely helped by the fact it's way underground in most sections due to a lack of surface land availability. However, it frequently stops or requires maintenance and is run by a totally separate bureaucracy than the rail system, who apparently refuse to communicate despite having shared stations. This leads to situations such as one encountered this weekend whereby the rail operator had track work scheduled on a major section of their route, and simultaneously the metro system had disrupted service, such that a great number of passengers were stranded. More importantly, even when it is working they do not coordinate arrival times, such that it is exceptionally common to arrive on one mode, where the platform faces directly the other mode, but it has just departed. 30 seconds of scheduling either side would greatly increase efficiency, but it's nobody's department. This is the sort of thing they do perfectly in Japan, but Australia is a country of 1000 little scams with everyone fervently minding their own scam. We urgently need to replace corrupt humans with AI.
"More importantly, even when it is working they do not coordinate arrival times, such that it is exceptionally common to arrive on one mode, where the platform faces directly the other mode, but it has just departed. 30 seconds of scheduling either side would greatly increase efficiency, but it's nobody's department."
This worked perfectly when I was in Sydney.
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> This is the sort of thing they do perfectly in Japan, but Australia is a country of 1000 little scams with everyone fervently minding their own scam. We urgently need to replace corrupt humans with AI.
Have you even see how sad people in Japan are ?
Go watch a few youtubers travel around Japan and tell me what you see ?
I only see kids to adults to seniors ALL going to school or work.
Why are tehre almost no people having a day off ?
Now you know why they have those gates on trains, they are too stop people jumping...
> If only most cities could have this today
Judging by the rest of the replies (most of which I'd agree with), it seems more uncommon that they do not, than they do :) I think this heavily depends on how friendly your government in general is to public transport, which can vary heavily if you're in some specific places in the world.
I don’t think that there was much fixed scheduling for water transport prior to the the development of steam engines either, because you were usually at the mercy of the winds and the tides.
Rowing was common and well known. Many ferries cross rivers where tides and the wind are not concerns. Winds near shore are often consistent enough to have near fixed frequency routes.
Ancient Mediterranean maps often reveal ferries and such were not going vast distances but rather they would go from small settlement to small settlement. This would be much smaller boats that could be easily rowed and, in turn, have relatively fixed frequencies. The small boats could get into ports that would be impossible to put a large ship into. As ships grew larger and sailing became more popular, longer distances would happen and then winds and tides would be more important.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trekschuit:
“Trekschuit (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈtrɛksxœyt] ⓘ; lit. 'tug-boat', i.e. 'tugged boat') is an old style of sail- and horse-drawn boat specific to the Netherlands, where it was used for centuries as a means of passenger traffic between cities along trekvaarten, or tow-canals.
[…]
By 1700, an extensive network of trekschuit- and ferry services linked all of the important cities in the coastal provinces of the Netherlands. Travel by trekschuit was reliable, comfortable, and cheap. The speed was about 7 km/h, which was faster than walking, and more comfortable than by coach. Many foreigners praised the advantages of the system, leading to the introduction of canals, such as the Erie Canal, in the United States. The boats were pulled along by horse on a towpath (in Dutch called jaagpad, named after the jager (chaser) which accompanied the horse)”
Scheduled sailings were common in the Roman world, and some medieval European economies. It helped keep ship sizes small when merchants could anticipate the fixed schedule.
Just dig a canal along the route you want, and use horses to pull the boat along it. See the other comments about the trekschuiten in the Netherlands.
That's right, I just read about that. Even crossing the English channel apparently was unpredictable at times.
The Carosses à cinq sols was not just an idea but a startup proper; Pascal invested most of what he owned for a sixth of the business, which turned out to be a great investment.
The main idea behind it was a kind of time share. At the time, only the (very) rich could afford to own and maintain carosses and stables with 6 to 10 horses in crowded cities like Paris; it was a truly revolutionary idea that a company would own the cars and the horses, and the general public would pay only for the time traveled.
Then the other genius idea, of course, was fixed routes and predictable schedule, as explained in the post. People actually objected at first that it would be stupid (and ruinous) to have empty carriages going from one place to another instead of chasing customers like a modern cab. But that was the whole point.
> Had this really not been done before? Apparently not on land. Ferries are an ancient idea, both for crossing water bodies and for traveling along them. They are fixed routes, of course, but that’s mostly because the shore is fixed.
Historically, not true for the “trekschuit” in 1632. For that, the shore didn’t exist before the route was envisioned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trekschuit:
“The first trekschuit 'sailed' in 1632 between Amsterdam and Haarlem and could carry 30 passengers. The trekvaart or canal was dug in a straight line to facilitate an easy pulling process and to guarantee the shortest route”
My late grandmother once told me this is how she travelled longer distances on occasion as a youth/young woman. Was a good lesson for me in understanding exactly how much she had seen the world change in her lifetime.
Just imagine how much we will see change in our lifetimes.
For some of us; that's dial-up, to AI, to who knows what.
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As an aside, the book "How Paris Became Paris" mentions Pascal's invention among many other that Paris was first with: elevated sidewalks, city lights, and more for any urban geeks.
Anyone else click through thinking this had to have been invented before 2024?
Regarding public transport route design, I've long wondered how much efficiency current routes in a given country might be leaving on the table.
As in: if one collected sufficient anonymised travel data to offer a reliable understanding of the population's travel needs, and given the fixed constraints of the existing road and rail network, and the existing number of buses and trains, how much more efficient could the network be by varying routes, timings, stops, and interactions?
Imagine if such a dataset was made available, and a prize offered for the best solution.
The challenge could also be extended to explore optimal areas for investment in additional infrastructure - a wider road here, a new roundabout or branch line there.
The best answer for many problems, is to avoid the action in the first place. Just because you can do it doesnt mean you should do it, and public transport is mostly thought to serve commuting.
A lot of people commute for hours to sit at a computer...which means they could work at home.
Pretty much all large public transit authorities already collect all sorts of data about requirements and usage, and have scientists/engineers on payroll to optimize the network within the economic and political constraints these systems operate in.
I know my city has that data, but it doesn't help if you optimize for the wrong thing. AFAICT the highest priority is that "everybody has to be within 3 blocks of a bus stop", resulting in serpentine routes the article decries.
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Not much. People plan for the lowest common denominator. If service levels surge during certain days or hours that's great, but people don't want to get burned by a period of thin service. Imagine if Fedex said overnight mail could no longer be delivered on Thursdays in certain towns. You'd have to remember to check if today's Wednesday and if the recipient's town is a low service zone. Or you could just switch to a more consistently available network like UPS.
Most transit is already biased to the 9-5 with thin nighttime service. As such most people uber back from the bar than wait for the 30 min owl bus service.
The interesting thing with transit is that optimal may not be the most optimal. E.g. your model might suggest half mile stop frequencies. Seems good, until the public comment period and all the old folks who take the line show up and ask their particular stop not be displaced.
There is a reason why a lot of american bus networks basically follow the same old streetcar routes that were always there. People become used to existing patterns and build lives around them. New transit is a good opportunity to apply this model, but reworking old transit is tricky because some of your existing ridership will end up with a worse offering by definition, and they will protest. While the people who might benefit will not show up with equivocal advocacy in the public comment meeting.
The bus stop spacing problem is very real. Buses stop every other block in my area. The average speed end to end is no faster than riding a bike! If you suggest deleting some stops people scream about their own convenience or pretend to care about the disabled. By trying to cater to every single constituency, we've designed a bus route that serves no one's interest. A slow bus might not exist at all. People will just buy a car, going into high interest debt if need be.
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I live in Helsinki, where there is a good tram and bus network. Every now and again a major road will be dug up, in the city center, and trams often get rerouted for a few months to work around that.
I've noticed that there are some diversions which are definitely beneficial to me. There are busses from my house to the city center, as well as a tram. If the tram diverts to a different destination that essentially doubles my available "travel destinations" in a way that's really useful.
So no doubt, for me personally, there are changes that could be useful. But perhaps they would be less useful for others.
You might explore "gray" semi-formal bus networks. Where the on-the-table gap is sufficient to fund businesses. And where the efforts to shut them down, provide insights into mechanisms, incentives, and interests, around that inefficiency.
due to how hard it is to change the networks, I think there's a lot of inefficient route design. if you look at SEPTA in Philadelphia, they're in the middle of realigning a lot of their bus routes for the first time in 60 yrs and ridership has increased noticeably since they started.
Well, there is some of that. It's not near as much as you might guess. Predictable transit is very helpful because people plan their life around it. What the data you're looking at will show where the bottlenecks are, and yes, you can remove a few bottlenecks and make people's life a little bit better, but it's not going to be a major change because of major change will not show up in the data until well after it's made.
I don't remember the terms used, but I've seen data sets of where people live and work in Manhattan, and you do see people who live on subway lines take jobs on that same line, and they don't take jobs on a different subway line that while possible is overly inconvenient.
people have already arranged their life around the existing transportation that exists around them. They are not going to change their life because it is already in place. They want bottlenecks fixed but otherwise don't really need a change to their life. Even if a change would greatly benefit them, they often can't see that and wouldn't imagine themselves making the change to their comfortable life.
The real value of transportation experts is they can look at a map and all your data and say, if we make these changes, over 20 years, the city will redevelop in this way, and then we can ask questions. "Is that how we want the city to develop?" however, the data is never going to show that because the data shows what people are doing today, not what they're going to do in 20 years. Don't get me wrong, experts get this wrong too when they make predictions. However, there is a lot of things we can use to inform our predictions. even though we're not perfect, we can make predictions that are usually right.
Varying the route timing is the absolute worst thing you can do. People need to depend on your transport system. If they have to look at a schedule that's going to change by day to figure out when they can actually get somewhere, they're going to get frustrated and start looking up for an alternative that they control. If you vary your timing at all, it's only because you're changing between a train every minute to train every five minutes. You don't get to go any farther apart than that without losing writers because they no longer can trust that the system will get them there when they want to be there. Physics puts a lower limit on time. I believe the current record is a train every 90 seconds, and I'm not sure how much closer together you can get. The limit for a bus is three minutes apart and even that is extremely hard.
Transit systems that are running worse than 5 minute frequencies have large drops in ridership and as they increase frequency: ridership jumps because people start to use, they can always just go out when they're ready to go. If this wasn't so expensive, everyone in the world would be running 5-minute frequencies all day.
I live fairly near a commuter rail stop—about a 8 minute drive but not walkable or cycle really even if I biked which I don’t.
It sorta works for going into the nearish big city for a 9-5 event. But it’s worthless for the evening because of infrequent trains.
I think Manhattan is kinda special because the lines are mostly parallel, there aren't as many east-west lines.
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"Efficency" in what domain? Travel time? Cost? Convenience/comfort?
about ferrys. Douglas Adams let one of his protagonists in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency postulate that the book of revelations was the product of despair waiting for a ferry
He really was a real Trail "Blaise"r
This is an example of the power of constraints that David Epstein talks about on Youtube (@DavidEpsteinAuthor) and in his book (Inside The Box).
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"He was fortunate to live at a time (the mid-1600s) when, if you were born to the right parents, nobody told you you needed to specialize."
Or, he could have been just that much smarter than you you, dismissive author.
"At age 11, Pascal had re-derived much of Euclid’s geometry from scratch because his father kept the books from him"
Guessing not in the author's bio
Two things can be true at the same time. Pascal was certainly a prodigy, but he was also largely living off family wealth and could afford to not specialize.