alt Hacker NewsThis is really a bad idea. I absolutely do not want to explain where I am going anytime I get on a bus or train. In Switzerland, most people just get on because they already have some general ticket for the year or month. And even those that don't, you can just enable 'EasyRide' and as long as that if active, at the end of the day (or when you disable it) it will calculate whatever you used.
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.
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"I absolutely do not want to explain where I am going anytime I get on a bus or train"
And why should the bus driver care about this? You can get off the bus if it doesn't suit you.
> This is really a bad idea. I absolutely do not want to explain where I am going anytime I get on a bus 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.