Blaise Pascal invented fixed route public transport (2024)
humantransit.org273 points by skadamat 4 days ago
273 points by skadamat 4 days ago
> 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.
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.
I knew that last bit, but somehow missed the selector, large as it is. Being Dutch, I am used to regional and local buses/coaches being more integrated (we also only have a single word for them both),[0] so it didn't immediately cross my mind. Very nice site, you do seem to have most of those regional cars!
[0] We do have touringcars, but those are more used for private rentals, not public transport, except for Flixbus etc. and a handful of longer-distance lines, and then we usually call them a bus again.
Thanks ! Yes, the French system is strange, it's a mess. Regionalised.
Being in the US, I feel mildly annoyed when the French complain about their public transit.
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.
Yes, my local transit system has 15 minute intervals at best, most routes are 30 or 60 minutes. And if you need to transfer routes, that's normally even more waiting. That really limits its attractiveness and so with a few exceptions it's mostly used by people who can't afford a car and are physically unable to bike.
I've often said that if I ran it I would concentrate resources on more frequent service on the highest ridership routes and cut the low ridership routes entirely. But for a variety of reasons that probably isn't possible, e.g. they are getting funding contingent on serving a wider area, etc.
A transit system should ideally be attractive to people who can afford to drive, but choose not to out of convenience. That's a pretty high bar in most areas.
Most Americans can not afford to buy a new car cash.
Only Chicago , and maybe Pittsburgh allows the average(income ) person to live car free and have a decent apartment.
You have folks in LA who pay upwards of 800$ a month in car payments on a 70k yr salary.
Most people are not buying a new car. The typical new car is bought, or more often leased, by someone who keeps it for three years. However, the average car on the road is 12 years old, which means there are a lot of cars that are being driven by someone who didn't buy them new.
Used cars are still expensive. I remember looking a Toyotas and a used Corolla was about 2000$ less than new.
I'd argue that individual car ownership is generally not affordable for most people. You can easily spend over 25% of your income just on transportation.
It's almost a structural problem. America isn't built for public transportation
How used? 2010 Corolla is about $10k, while 2024 will be $20-30k.
America is plenty dense for transit, but you need to build it first and that is expensive.
It was basically a year old, but with financing incentives a new car was the same price.
A 15 year old car will have 15 years of issues. I might be willing to risk it at 3 to 5k. 10k is a lot to gamble.