Yesterday I said with regard to @pareene’s take about making things work that to improve bus service we need to make government more technocratic & less responsible to people who yell at community meetings.

@kdrum said unpopular ideas will still get voted down. Let me explain.

Most bus routes in the US stop very frequently.

If you identify low demand stops and remove them, the bus can run faster and because it runs faster it can also run more frequently. A faster, more frequent bus is more useful so more people will ride it.

Good stuff!

And because more people are riding the bus, the system has more revenue. If some routes are overcrowded you can add even more service. Or else if crowding isn’t an issue, you can cut fares.

No reason to think any of this would be unpopular, but...

... if you happen to be a person who uses a low-demand bus stop slated for elimination fairly regularly, then you are going to yell at the community meeting about it.

To make the improvement, technical analysis of ridership patterns and bus speeds needs to trump yelling.

Obviously people can use words in different ways.

But that to me is what “technocratic” governance means — elected officials empowering subject matter experts to make changes aimed at achieving high level goals rather than prioritizing whoever is most fired up about each thing.