this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2026
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Today I Learned
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What's demand response?
My guess is taxis and things like Uber.
Something you have to call up/book to get anywhere
It's a bonkers newish form of not-a-bus, often running passenger vans, usually operates where you either book your rides a day or two in advance or book with an app and wait 5-120 minutes for it to show up, and the service runs door to door.
They're ultimately super inefficient in the real world requiring an extremely high driver:passenger ratio to be at all competitive with bus services
Edit to add: it's basically the answer to "what if taxi replace bus?"
oh come off it, it's a great way to provide service in areas that are NEVER going to get proper bus lines otherwise.
We use it in most of sweden (as a fallback in rural areas) and it's perfectly functional.
Oh yeah it makes perfect sense for very small towns and rural areas, but when a city with a population measured in the hundreds of thousands seriously tries to run a demand response transit system as literally it's entire transit system, it deserves more than this level of derision
right, but maybe americans can try to remember that actual rural areas (as in, something between the density of suburbia and wyoming) do exist, and that the entire world doesn't consist of 30 megacities in a desert? It's very frustrating to see perfectly valid modes of transport dismissed as bonkers and inefficient, when it demonstrably works okay in the right circumstances and enables 90% of my country to have any sort of public transport at all.
I see this kind of thing so often from americans, taking their personal experiences with public transport and their local conditions, and projecting that upon the entire concept of public transport as a whole.
Everything from "public transport is full of stinky druggies and is only for the truly desperate", to "the only form of public transport that exists is buses; trains and trams are ancient and irrelevant". And it's baffling because just looking at how things work in the rest of the world would immediately disabuse those notions.
Hey man, I get the frustration, but your frustration is misplaced. I presently live in a town of ~10k people, married a woman who grew up on a goat farm outside of a town of 700, I work in an unincorporated community of around 400. I just took a big vacation in which I rode about a dozen different transit systems, and I'm already planning the next one. I'm a freaking model railroader and I've been looking at potential adding a running model bus system to my model railroad as well.
Trust me I get what you're saying, I understand the exact frustrations you've expressed, I just ask you do the same for me