> 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.
> 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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 cities do have that. A train every 2-5 minutes during busy hours.
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.
This exists in many cities. See Bus Rapid Transit and many rail lines. Seattle's network has many instances of this.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.