One City Saved $5M by Routing School Buses with an Algorithm • Hacker News Board

Re: One City Saved $5M by Routing School Buses with an Algorithm

#81

Post by dsfyu404ed » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 12:32 PM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #29

ndjskska wrote: post #27

In Germany we're assigned to the nearest school. I remember walking to school in elementary school, later taking the bike for 20 min or public transportation. I don't live in a particularly dense area. Is Boston too sparsely populated to have schools in walking or biking distance? Seems that we accept distances of 1-2 km for elementary school walks. (0.6 to 1.2 miles)

Boston is different from this in a whole variety of ways. 1) Americans just in general tend to drive their kids to school dues to fear of child abductions and related ever-present paranoia. 2) Boston's transportation system is broken on just about every levels. The street organization is irrational, derived haphazardly from ad-hoc pre-auto paths. The public transit system was also built in an ad-hoc and is at level w…

>Americans just in general tend to drive their kids to school dues to fear of child abductions and related ever-present paranoia.

This is really just an upper middle class thing.

>The street organization is irrational, derived haphazardly from ad-hoc pre-auto paths. The public transit system was also built in an ad-hoc and is at level where full transit lines stop for days at a time. So all that's left is driving, though Boston drivers have a terrible reputation too!

The smallest streets are haphazard. The big stuff was all planned out to make the overall system function well, got 80% done then some special interests kicked money to the right politicians and they stopped progress at 85%. Ditto for the subway. Every couple decades they come up with a grand plan to make it not suck then special interests compromise it out of existence. Boston drivers are fine once you've been there long enough to understand the unwritten rules. If you're naive and think you can follow the letter of the law you will have a bad time.

>Boston's weather is also miserable - the place is at just latitude so that wet, 30 degree weather prevails in winter, giving freezing rain, frozen rain, slush and all manner of nastiness. Plus horrible hot, humid summers. So you have to avoid walking a lot.

The weather is fine. Kids are much more tolerant of weather extremes than their white collar parents (the ones who dominate the debate over this kind of thing) who's days are spent in three different climate controlled boxes (house/apartment, car, office). If you do it every day it's really not a big deal.

Re: One City Saved $5M by Routing School Buses with an Algorithm

#82

Post by magashna » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 12:38 PM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #60

joe_the_user wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boston is different from this in a whole variety of ways. 1) Americans just in general tend to drive their kids to school dues to fear of child abductions and related ever-present paranoia. 2) Boston's transportation system is broken on just about every levels. The street organization is irrational, derived haphazardly from ad-hoc pre-auto paths. The public transit system was also built in an ad-hoc and is at level w…

>The street organization is irrational, derived haphazardly from ad-hoc pre-auto paths. Isn't thus true of any European city?

Boston and metro Boston also have a pretty high population density, so it doesn't help that early roads were laid out by cud chewing surveyors.

Re: One City Saved $5M by Routing School Buses with an Algorithm

#83

Post by magashna » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 12:40 PM UTC

dx034 wrote: post #74

dtwest wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, it is actually hotter, it is actually colder, it's all of those things you sarcastically point out. Except being too small or dense, who told you that? I'm from the American Midwest and I'm currently in Northern Europe. The difference is huge. The density issue of American suburbs is real, and the phenomenon is relatively rare globally. Go check out Google Earth. How do you not see it? The weather is also…

That's true for the Midwest but not necessarily for Boston. The temperature range is a bit larger in Boston but German cities can also have >100F weeks in summer and several weeks of snow in winter.

Snow is fine, but Boston will get 3 feet of snow, then an hour of freezing rain, and the next day it will be 45F. Winter is chaos

Re: One City Saved $5M by Routing School Buses with an Algorithm

#84

Post by dsfyu404ed » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 12:42 PM UTC

dx034 wrote: post #74

dtwest wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, it is actually hotter, it is actually colder, it's all of those things you sarcastically point out. Except being too small or dense, who told you that? I'm from the American Midwest and I'm currently in Northern Europe. The difference is huge. The density issue of American suburbs is real, and the phenomenon is relatively rare globally. Go check out Google Earth. How do you not see it? The weather is also…

That's true for the Midwest but not necessarily for Boston. The temperature range is a bit larger in Boston but German cities can also have >100F weeks in summer and several weeks of snow in winter.

Boston in particular is full of people who think the weather is super extreme in the winter. It's mostly a cultural identity thing with a side of massholes being pansies. It's probably easier to pander to them than to tell them they're wrong.

Source: masshole who has has lived in places with harsher climates

Re: One City Saved $5M by Routing School Buses with an Algorithm

#85

Post by dsfyu404ed » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 12:42 PM UTC

magashna wrote: post #83

dx034 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true for the Midwest but not necessarily for Boston. The temperature range is a bit larger in Boston but German cities can also have >100F weeks in summer and several weeks of snow in winter.

Snow is fine, but Boston will get 3 feet of snow, then an hour of freezing rain, and the next day it will be 45F. Winter is chaos

And that situation would literally just be business as usual in somewhere like Bangor or Buffalo. In Boston it's an excuse for half the city to call out of work and the MBTA to run trains "whenever we get around to it".

Re: One City Saved $5M by Routing School Buses with an Algorithm

#86

Post by CallOfTheWilde » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 12:43 PM UTC

rypskar wrote: post #70

atomwaffel wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, as a European, I’m always amazed at how far south the northern US and even southern Canada really is. With that said, those are latitudes, not longitudes.

>>With that said, those are latitudes, not longitudes. Someone once told be a simple way to remember the difference. Longitude and latitude was first used be Greeks to travel the Mediterranean ocean (not sure if that is true, but helps with remembering); The Mediterranean ocean is long from East to West, so moving in the long direction changes the longitude.

I was taught that latitude lines resemble the rungs of a ladder ("lat"-er, I suppose), or alternatively that longitude lines are all equally long.

Re: One City Saved $5M by Routing School Buses with an Algorithm

#87

Post by jefftk » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 12:48 PM UTC

deskamess wrote: post #75

yardstick wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For elementary students apparently “Hundreds of families were facing a 9:30 to 7:15 a.m. shift.” That’s a significant change in wake up time. Yeah, I’m not keen on that. It’s a non-starter.

Wait... I thought they were going to later start times? The article indicated that studies showed start time before 8am were not helpful.

The studies showed that early start times for teenagers were a problem, but not for elementary schoolers. The schools had previously (and still do) started teenagers very early and elementary students later, and this proposal swapped them.

Re: One City Saved $5M by Routing School Buses with an Algorithm

#88

Post by ido » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 12:54 PM UTC

lonnyk wrote: post #54

Swizec wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) Americans just in general tend to drive their kids to school dues to fear of child abductions and related ever-present paranoia. Is it true that in some places this paranoia has gotten so far that you’ll get reported to child services if you let your kids walk to school? > 3) Boston's weather is also miserable - the place is at just latitude so that wet, 30 degree weather prevails in winter, giving freezing rain…

> What’s the problem with walking a kilometer or two Where I grew up in New Jersey I lived 2 miles (3.2 KM) from school and I was considered close to the school. Those who lived within a 10-20 minute walk would walk. Many of us who lived further away would rely on the bus. Edit: And this was for elementary and middle school (up to age 13). From ages 14-18 everyone was significantly further away.

Assuming you were in a city rather than a rural area, is it because US school are larger & fewer? Nowhere in my hometown (250k mid-sized city) is more than 10-15 minutes walk from a school.

Re: One City Saved $5M by Routing School Buses with an Algorithm

#89

Post by ikeyany » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 12:54 PM UTC

mattlondon wrote: post #78

Interesting - so is it "a thing" in the US that the city runs a dedicated bus service for all schools/students? Quite a surprise for me considering how poor people say public transport is in general in the US? In the UK some schools run their own bus things (in the same way that Goolge, Facebook et al do in San Francisco), but most of the other schools just get by with the public buses. There is often some coordinati…

They're usually part-timers or neighborhood parents volunteering.

Re: One City Saved $5M by Routing School Buses with an Algorithm

#90

Post by jefftk » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 12:55 PM UTC

mattlondon wrote: post #78

Interesting - so is it "a thing" in the US that the city runs a dedicated bus service for all schools/students? Quite a surprise for me considering how poor people say public transport is in general in the US? In the UK some schools run their own bus things (in the same way that Goolge, Facebook et al do in San Francisco), but most of the other schools just get by with the public buses. There is often some coordinati…

Most US cities and towns have minimal public transit that wouldn't be anywhere near sufficient for getting kids to and from school, so they run school buses instead. In some places with good public transit, like Somerville MA where I live, the city doesn't run school buses and people walk or take general purpose public transit, but that's very unusual here.

It's the same deal as the tech shuttles: in places where public transit is good (NYC, Chicago, Boston) the tech companies don't run shuttles because there's no need.

> What do the US school buses and their drivers do for the rest of the day and on weekends? Just sit idle?

Yes. The drivers typically work a "split shift" with time off in the middle of the day, and the buses sit empty both then and on weekends.