Flagged, paywalls without a workaround are not permitted on HN.
MIT team’s school-bus algorithm could save $5M and 1M bus miles
31–40 of 113 posts
Re: MIT team’s school-bus algorithm could save $5M and 1M bus miles
#32Kind of off topic but... why is no one converting school buses to electric? Seems like a perfect opportunity. Lots of space for batteries. High torque. Short runs in the morning and afternoon. Think of how many diesel school busses there are across just the USA every morning.
And think of the cost. Diesel is cheap, buses stay in service for years and it takes just a few minutes to refuel. You’d need hundreds of charging stations for every school district. Instead of just a few fuel pumps. It would cost literally 10s of billions to convert all school buses for a marginal cost benefit.
School buses also have secondary uses as evacuation vehicles so relying on electric isn’t a secure option. Hurricane Katrina, for example, used hundreds of buses for evacuations and it would have been extremely difficult to charge a bunch of buses off generators.
Re: MIT team’s school-bus algorithm could save $5M and 1M bus miles
#33Kind of off topic but... why is no one converting school buses to electric? Seems like a perfect opportunity. Lots of space for batteries. High torque. Short runs in the morning and afternoon. Think of how many diesel school busses there are across just the USA every morning.
Newer London buses are all hybrid and there are some electric as well I think?
Re: MIT team’s school-bus algorithm could save $5M and 1M bus miles
#34I worked with a startup years ago that did these kinds of optimizations (for deliveries). The logistics & transportation market in the US is about a TRILLION dollars -- small optimizations can make a HUGE impact. The challenge for practical implementations is that there are lots and lots and lots of optimization factors that are very hard to account for. Often, you don't even know what they are until you try to autom…
Another example: a lot of rural areas have patches of gravel roads. It's not obvious from Google maps where the roads go from paved to gravel (and they sometimes do it in random sections). Naively looking at a map, you'd think a roundabout route had potential to be shorter, but not realize the road was gravel.
I imagine many data sets track surface.
Surface data in OpenStreetMap is pretty incomplete, but it is easy to add to a road and is well used when present (cycle routing is a popular use of OSM and avoiding soft and uneven surfaces is handy for cycle routing).
Re: MIT team’s school-bus algorithm could save $5M and 1M bus miles
#35Since this forum for founder/entrepreneur types, let me inject a bit of caution from my own experience with dealing with government organizations: If you save a business organization money, they appreciate it. If you save a government organization money, the next year the "savings" is likely to be deducted from their budget. They don't get to benefit from the savings and thus their motivations aren't what you might e…
Agreed. This is why we need zero-based budgeting. Force organizations to justify every dollar every year rather than just using previous years as the starting point.
Meh, there are times/places when that is a good idea.
But if you make it annual standard operating procedure, then you are paying people to create spreadsheets and documents rather than, say, do something useful.
And the money will funnel to the people who are awesome at creating spreadsheets and documents rather than the people who are good at doing useful stuff.
Effective oversight requires understanding the domain and being motivated to continually improve things.
Re: MIT team’s school-bus algorithm could save $5M and 1M bus miles
#36Flagged, paywalls without a workaround are not permitted on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
There is a workaround posted elsewhere in the comments
http://facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/how...
Re: MIT team’s school-bus algorithm could save $5M and 1M bus miles
#37Since this forum for founder/entrepreneur types, let me inject a bit of caution from my own experience with dealing with government organizations: If you save a business organization money, they appreciate it. If you save a government organization money, the next year the "savings" is likely to be deducted from their budget. They don't get to benefit from the savings and thus their motivations aren't what you might e…
Uhmm. Saving money doesn't mean they have to give it back you know. They could spend on other things like better computers for kids, more staff etc.
Re: MIT team’s school-bus algorithm could save $5M and 1M bus miles
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. This is why we need zero-based budgeting. Force organizations to justify every dollar every year rather than just using previous years as the starting point.
That doesn't work either: you get situations like the TSA artificially backing up airport security lines to "necessitate" budget increases. They should incentivize efficiency. In government, it would be citizen impact per employee. If you have more, you make more money, if you have less, you make less.
> citizen impact per employee.
Do you think it would actually possible to quantify this in a way that:
1. Accurately represented "reality"?
2. Couldn't/wouldn't be gamed?
Seems challenging to me.
Re: MIT team’s school-bus algorithm could save $5M and 1M bus miles
#39Kind of off topic but... why is no one converting school buses to electric? Seems like a perfect opportunity. Lots of space for batteries. High torque. Short runs in the morning and afternoon. Think of how many diesel school busses there are across just the USA every morning.
Not sure if by "converting" you mean retrofitting old buses or replacing diesel buses with new electric buses. If it's the former definition, it's non-trivial from a safety and engineering standpoint to integrate a high-voltage, high-energy battery system into an old bus and expect to realize a decent ROI. Those old clunkers are not designed with an electric powertrain nor efficiency (i.e. they're heavy and have have drag coefficients) in mind. Furthermore, safety is paramount in most bus operations, and a lot of thought needs to go into mitigating thermal runaway or other catastrophic failure modes with systems of that voltage (100s of V) and energy (300kWh+). Depending on the existing bus system that the battery needs to be integrated into, this can be challenging and sometimes infeasible.
I say all of this more to make the argument that rather than retrofit old buses, in my opinion it makes more sense to outright replace them. Right now Proterra is the largest domestic producer of pure electric buses. They compete on most contracts with BYD in China, and New Flyer in Canada. Behind BYD and the government, the electric bus market in China has absolutely exploded over the last several years. Proterra is anticipating high growth in the U.S. market as well and just launched a new factory in LA last month [2].
[1]https://www.proterra.com [2]https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2017/07/26/proterra...
Re: MIT team’s school-bus algorithm could save $5M and 1M bus miles
#40I am glad that people are using algorithms to increase efficiency. But, this seems to only save $5M out of a $120M budget - I was expecting and am hoping for more. I feel like it would be an awesome project to dissect a large public institutions funding and to discuss ways that algorithms can help reduce costs without reducing the quality of service and agility of the organization. The site would not allow me to read…
If you prepend "facebook.com/l.php?u=" to a wsj link, it will let you read the full article. Like so: http://facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/how...
ooh, this used to work when searching the article in Google but has since stopped. Glad this workaround exists!