Blockchain makes public transportation composable

Friday, September 15th, 2023

One of the biggest pains in the world for a long time was the ability to use a single transit card attached to a single payment method to use different modes: bus, train, BART; and to do so in different cities and counties.

I think many places have finally reconciled those within a small region, but the second you go across state lines, it's not going to work. Which is understandable: most travel on public transporatation will be local.

But a central blockchain, even if it s orchestrated by the same token, can accomodate different transportation systems and jurisdictions under the concept of Blockchain protocol design as public policy.

In that article I initially surface the idea of public transportation and I'm going to explore it further.

The composability has many dimensions. But to get there, we need to first talk about its flexible, bottoms-yp design when applied to transportation.

The problem with many public service systems (and this is NORT going to replace the existing systems, nor can it) is to move bottoms up in a dynamic way.

When Chariot first came into San Francisco, it found PMF because it could identify the high0-value and high-demand areas. It found a valuable niche that the traditional bus systems couldn't support because those lines are very fixed. But it addressed the pricing issues with the ride sharing services -- one which will only get worse I predict with Uber needing to take more profits.

There's a middle space for a crowd-source line enerator; but gaining more awareness with riders, Chariot was able to ask where people lived and where they went to work; based on this, they were able to come up with optimized routes that had demand.

This is much more efficient. Imagine 15 separate cars on the roads versus a single flexible bus that took the same route.

If this bus were part of the public transportation system ecosystem, it could even benefit from the stop areas or specialized lanes.

But even if it didn't, the net impact would be to flexible and efficiently remove the need for private car services with a public-private bus.

And it wouldn't need to be big bang.

It could literally start with one bus and one line, and using the reservation system, control demand.

If someone wasn't able to get on, they could indicate as such, capture intended demand, and then launch a new bus on a given route or a new route.

This bottoms0up approach is like faster releases in agile software development, and doesn't requir ethe big bang scale of a network system.

This also reduces the complexity. Real time routing and scheduling with disparate, decentralized drivers is omplicated, and if this were a requirement, would stop the project from the beginning.

But the routes can be optimized and designed off-line in batches, and wouldn't be expected to change because the commute lines are typically relatively static.

As awareness grew among employers, the commutes can improve; for example, WIFI could be equipped on these busses and rolled out incrementally if that were important. Or of better use or recommendation, everyone meditates with headsets on their way into work, shielding themselves from the traffic and congestion.

What does this mean for the existiing public transportation ssystem: because this service is not designed to be profit taking, but a partnership, the rents or surplus from fees can go back into the blockchain based business. Governance can be more transparent than it typically is, with voting performed on chain by those who are impacted the most: the riders and drivers.

The income disparity, over time, could also be addressed via on chain voting by consistuents.

For example,in a place like San Francisco, many of the public servants like teachers, firefighters policemen, social workers may have a regular commute, as well, which costs them in gas, insurance, and perhaps even parking; this system could optimiaze the commute to impact as many civil servants as possible and give them transportation for free. So it's not an awesome perk in the big scheme of things, but it can incrementally improve the quality of their lives to not have to pay for transportation to and from work, to sit in traffic behind a steering wheel and to pay potentially for things like parking and gas.

This would be an easy and direct and visible subsidty to offer as a benefit that is inspectible by the public -- perhaps not just the users of the system, but could be a benefit which increases the number of civil servants as more commuters use the blockchain service to fund it. This ensure it is fundable, while incentivizing those respective agencies to encourage private sector workers.

For example, the PTA could offer discounted gift cards to all their knokwledge workers and convey what the on-chain benefit is.

This flywheel could then increase the scope and ompact of the transportation system to not only cater to highly paid knowledge workers, but to subsidized civil servants in the city.

This could, of course, continue to expand as the economics make sense and complement the existing public transportation system by aiding lower income workers; it could reduce the number of large fixed-line busses and those drivers could be in the smaller, shorter route, more flexible routes, so there isn't a loss of jobs. In the end, this overlaid, organic, dynamic system could increase usage while effectively lowering costs for lower incomes.

Incomes could be proven privately on chain and automatically adjust the fees without any proof of identity. This is much further into the future, but the automation with existing services is possible.

Because the routes are citizen generated -- the blockchain's ability to attached behavior to identity and in some cases to a staking/slashing system from greater cryptoeconomic security -- makes it dynamic with these smaller busses.

What is powerful with this more permissionless approach is, independent providers could choose to compete for routes or route offerings. They may provide comfier cars, or drivers of a specific language, and these attributes can be part of the bidding process for approval of a given route. If there's enough demand, the suppliers can flex to meet that demand, adn we introduce market dynamics into the quality of the drivers and the busses themselves.

To me, this becomes a more flexible approach to drivers. instead of a monolithic bus driver union, a set of drivers can form an autonomous collective, compete for routes, choose how they want the surplus fees to be distributed amongst themselves in terms of pay, benefits, reinvestment into new vehicles;

The government agency continues to have on-chain oversight, and these can be codified on chain contracts. So there will need to be, for example, only permitted specifications of busses. Or there must be provable drivers records. Or they could put mechanics to prevent price gouging. If the economic design is overseen properly and designed well, the different policy objectives can be algorithmically programmed on chain with broader citizen participaiton instead of opaque decisions made without any democratic input.

Small 15-20 person busses are a good form factor for this use case; repair and replacement costs are less onerous, and there can be an ongoing upgrade process in smaller increments as new vehicles and technologies are released (electric busses, for example, are hard to introduce when buses are large; smaller busses will be very viable).