Blaise Pascal invented fixed route public transport (2024)

> 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.

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.

> 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

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.

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.

> 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”

The Carosses à cinq sols was not just an idea but a startup proper; Pascal invested most of what he owned for a sixth of the business, which turned out to be a great investment.

The main idea behind it was a kind of time share. At the time, only the (very) rich could afford to own and maintain carosses and stables with 6 to 10 horses in crowded cities like Paris; it was a truly revolutionary idea that a company would own the cars and the horses, and the general public would pay only for the time traveled.

Then the other genius idea, of course, was fixed routes and predictable schedule, as explained in the post. People actually objected at first that it would be stupid (and ruinous) to have empty carriages going from one place to another instead of chasing customers like a modern cab. But that was the whole point.

As an aside, the book "How Paris Became Paris" mentions Pascal's invention among many other that Paris was first with: elevated sidewalks, city lights, and more for any urban geeks.

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.

Anyone else click through thinking this had to have been invented before 2024?

about ferrys. Douglas Adams let one of his protagonists in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency postulate that the book of revelations was the product of despair waiting for a ferry

He really was a real Trail "Blaise"r

This is an example of the power of constraints that David Epstein talks about on Youtube (@DavidEpsteinAuthor) and in his book (Inside The Box).

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"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