Helsinki’s personalized bus service is like Uber for public transit

Now <i>this</i> is interesting, when compared to Uber and the like. I imagine it requires a large ridership to be worthwhile (otherwise you&#x27;re basically dispatching large cabs, but charging less), but it&#x27;s a fascinating concept for large cities.<p>I imagine there are downsides though - if you&#x27;re using it to get to work then surely your journey time is variable?

This was actually proposed by by Christopher Alexander in _A Pattern Language_ originally published in 1977. He cites an MIT study from which he may have gotten the idea.<p><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=hwAHmktpk5IC&amp;&amp;pg=PA110" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;books.google.com&#x2F;books?id=hwAHmktpk5IC&amp;&amp;pg=PA110</a><p>I&#x27;m actually surprised it hasn&#x27;t been done before now, we&#x27;ve had the technology for a while. (It&#x27;s not clear from the brief write-up if this one is a private company or municipal service).<p>The entry from A Pattern Language has stuck with me as a good idea (and because it was rather atypical for the other patterns Alexander included, this is the only one i recall that&#x27;s so overtly related to IT). Alexander&#x27;s version predates cell&#x2F;smartphones phones as well as the powerful computers of the 21st century;. it assumes you still need some fixed &#x27;stops&#x27; with phones next to them for people to call for dispatch. But the basic idea of routing small busses based on demand and shared rides, using computer software to make it feasible, is there.

I live in Helsinki and have tried this service a couple of times. Every time I have had the whole van for myself, except once there was a journalist doing a story on the fancy new service. It&#x27;s not really fair to compare the price to a single bus ride: if you live in Helsinki and don&#x27;t own a car, you already have a monthly ticket and the incremental cost of getting on a bus is zero. This is in effect a cheap taxi that&#x27;s a little less convenient.<p>What I think they&#x27;re really doing is getting around Finland&#x27;s taxi permit system (there&#x27;s a limited number of taxi permits so there is no real competition) by building a taxi-like service that can only pick you up and drop you off at bus stops, which apparently avoids getting the vans classified as taxis.

<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/10/the-illegal-private-bus-system-that-works/246166/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;national&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2011&#x2F;10&#x2F;the-ille...</a><p>But those are not hip tech entrepreneurs...

I&#x27;d love this. If American public transportation fans would stop fantasizing about trains and instead do what really works for most people -- buses -- then we could have things a lot better.<p>I&#x27;ve been waiting for <i>years</i> for a service that dispatches a nice bus to ride in on my way to work without me having to walk&#x2F;drive to a bus stop and hope the schedule is right.<p>I&#x27;d accept a modest increase in the commute time if I could read&#x2F;sleep&#x2F;play&#x2F;watch TV for the duration of the commute.

I stayed at a town in Turkey, Trabzon I think, where the whole town seemed to run on a related concept - the &quot;taxibus&quot;. It was very low tech, based purely on flagging down a taxibus that looked like it was going the right way, but it worked extremely well. Price was reasonable, the town was full of them so it was easy to get a ride, and you got exactly where you were going unlike with a bus. I&#x27;ve been wanting to see a higher tech version for larger towns &#x2F; cities ever since.

Northern Irish black taxis used to use this basic idea sans the technology. You&#x27;d typically get in to a taxi, ask what direction it&#x27;s going, and if it was going roughly where you wanted, you&#x27;d wait until it had filled up with other people going in the same direction.<p>As you&#x27;d imagine, getting from the centre of town back home was fine, but it didn&#x27;t quite work the other way.<p>Making this process more flexible by adding technology is a great idea, though it&#x27;d depend on the demographic of people who&#x27;d want a service like this and whether they actually have smartphones.

We&#x27;ve actually been working on something like this for San Francisco (and we plan to expand onwards after operating here): <a href="http://www.takehitch.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.takehitch.com</a><p>The municipality tends to work a little slower here (chatted a bit with SFMTA in the past), so we&#x27;re starting with a model that just focuses on private cars. But the fundamental point--dynamic re-routing to create custom routes where people can ride in the same vehicle--is very much in the spirit of what we&#x27;re doing.<p>We&#x27;re still in a pre-launch phase, but check out our iOS app: <a href="http://www.takehitch.com/download" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.takehitch.com&#x2F;download</a>

This is based on a software by ajelo.com which is based on some interesting research:<p>Why urban mass demand responsive transport?:<p><a href="http://www.floating-content.net/~esa/pub/files/jokinen-fists-2011.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.floating-content.net&#x2F;~esa&#x2F;pub&#x2F;files&#x2F;jokinen-fists...</a><p>Demand responsive transport: Models and algorithms:<p>lib.tkk.fi&#x2F;Diss&#x2F;2013&#x2F;isbn9789526051635&#x2F;isbn9789526051635.pdf

There is a bus which was making runs by the Caltrain station that made me think of this same thing. Which is basically if you took a bus that was going to a common aggregation node (like Caltrain) and let people summon it (like Uber) you could then present them with an estimate when the bus would show up (like NextBus) and how long the trip would take to your destination. Then in the morning as everyone summoned &quot;I want to get to Caltrain&quot; you layout the route and start driving. The bus driver just has a modified GPS navigator thing which is telling them to turn and to stop and wait.<p>Connect the dots with NFC and you&#x27;ve got Uber Bus or something similar.

If you don&#x27;t have consistent high ridership buses can easily fall below the efficiency of cars. I&#x27;d bet DRT could replace a lot of bus lines that are not hitting efficiency thresholds and deliver better service.<p>Might be a good solution for lower-density areas where its difficult to make buses efficient. I wonder how low the population density can go before DRT stops working.

This is called the Dial-a-ride problem or pickup and delivery problem with time windows in optimization literature in case anyone is interested.

Here is a link to the official page of the service: <a href="https://kutsuplus.fi/tour" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kutsuplus.fi&#x2F;tour</a><p>It&#x27;s always nice to get new services, but I&#x27;m afraid this one will become a niche product due to the public transport system in Helsinki already is working so well.<p>A service that is used a lot is the Tour Planner which was one of the first ones released for public transport in the world (I think this is already the third version of it): <a href="http://www.reittiopas.fi/en/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reittiopas.fi&#x2F;en&#x2F;</a>

It should be noted that it isn&#x27;t shown if this project is economically viable. The project is funded with tax money.<p>I myself use the service almost daily, enjoying the taxi rides which cost $5. I would bet that the real cost of one trip is something like $50. Almost all the time I&#x27;m the only customer in the bus. The service quality drops noticiebly when the driver needs to pick up&#x2F;drop other customers. I will probably stop using the service if it gets popular.

I wonder how relevant solutions to combinatorial optimization problems like the traveling salesman problem[1] are to something like this (with the number of nodes increasing decreasing, and changing location).<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Travelling_salesman_problem</a>

If this will be deployed in UBER&#x27;s model, i.e. freelanced drivers of vans, this could scale very rapidly very fast.

This isn&#x27;t new, really. It was already possible to book a taxi &#x2F; van; elderly people often use services like this.<p>Second, some bus lines get so little used you need to call ahead two hours in advance before they send a bus to the bus stop.

This is public service that is subsidized by goverment and its not profitable and its goal is to help elderly get around in the city. It has some additional stops beyond normal bus stops, and it has far more limited service area than normal busses in the Capital. For instance the air port is outside the service area. Its also a nice complementary service for public transport on uncommon trips that would take too much time to change between 3 different busses or more.

I&#x27;m running a service optimizing deliveries (<a href="https://fleetnavi.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fleetnavi.com</a>, Bulgarian language <i>only</i> although it&#x27;s fully usable when auto-translated with Chrome). I&#x27;ve been thinking of using the engine to do public transit like this, or a courier service (airbnb for couriers), or a transportation services exchange. Contact me if you think we could work together on something similar.

I love this and have been in love with a similar idea for a while. Kickstarter-style charter buses - only when enough people agree that they need a ride from Area A to Area B will the bus be chartered from a company. You can have spontaneous bus routes, that get cheaper as more people join the route. Over time, when patterns start revealing themselves, you can build regular shuttle routes and put a big dent in the public transit problem in the Bay Area.

<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=hwAHmktpk5IC&amp;pg=PA111&amp;lpg=PA111&amp;dq=pattern+language+minibus&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=luQpT5zZ5B&amp;sig=Lep_DvxTQDEdgoHvMyORhRb6gRY&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=28khU5vlIcmb2QXLmIGYCQ&amp;ved=0CCgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;q=pattern%20language%20minibus&amp;f=false" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;books.google.com&#x2F;books?id=hwAHmktpk5IC&amp;pg=PA111&amp;lpg=P...</a>

I believe that the big shipping companies (UPS, Fedex), have algorithms specifically designed around dynamic route planning like this. I wonder if it would be feasible for one of them to create a spin off business for just this purpose.

&quot;detroit&quot; (as in the community, not the municipal government) is doing something similar, except it&#x27;s privately run. <a href="http://thedetroitbus.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thedetroitbus.com&#x2F;</a>

Isn&#x27;t this basically SuperShuttle?

I suppose the pitch for such a service could be:<p>&quot;crowd-sourced bus routes&quot;.

I hate that I just saw the comments for that article.

Mixed feelings for me. I wrote a paper on the very same thing, &quot;Demand responsive public transportation&quot; but never really had the conviction to implement it full scale as I thought it would simply fail in a country with huge population as india, where there is always demand in all locations. It would be interesting to see how it would fare in a densely populated route.