African Bus Routes Redrawn Using Cell-Phone Data • Hacker News Board

Re: African Bus Routes Redrawn Using Cell-Phone Data

#31

Post by stephenhuey » Tue, Apr 30, 2013, 7:16 PM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #28

stephenhuey wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you use Google? :) Not meaning to offend! As someone who grew up in an African nation, I will easily concede to some of the parents in this thread that it's often just easier to get people's attention if you use something recognizable in a news headline. That being said, it is odd to me that it's the MIT Technology Review doing it in an age when anyone can double-click a string of text in the browser, e.g. Ivory…

Here's the real kicker: if I don't know where the country is, why would I care enough to google it? "Africa" in this situation gives me more info than the name of the country would.

You never look up things you don't recognize? I care to look things up every day, and before the web I used physical dictionaries and encyclopedias on a frequent basis. Some people may never feel that inquisitive, but quite a lot of us are, and I'd imagine most people on HN are like that.

Re: African Bus Routes Redrawn Using Cell-Phone Data

#32

Post by rahulnair23 » Tue, Apr 30, 2013, 7:19 PM UTC

ippisl wrote: post #20

rahulnair23 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I'm from the IBM Research team who worked on this. The reduction is in total system-wide journey times in passenger-minutes (travel time + expected waiting time). The model makes underlying assumptions on how people arrive at stops to do their trips, and how they choose paths through the network. The wait times are therefore related to frequency of services. The statistic is also broken down by each route what ha…

Thanks. Really interesting work. Are you allowed to share some of the data ? If so: Does the time includes time to walk to bus station or an estimate? Is there some histogram of time saved per passenger ? or even something like X% of passengers save a big amount of time ? Do you have a way to estimate time save by adding routes or alternative transport(like jitneys) before making the change? Those are interesting, bu…

Yes travel time includes time to walk from the Cell tower (considered the "source" and "sink") to the stops.

We could generate passenger level stats for the sample we observed, but have presented it at the route level for now, since its targeted towards operators.

Yes, the improvements reported are from adding of new routes (the article title suggests that we "redrew" current routes). The new routes are generated from "frequent" patterns we see in the data. Haven't looked specifically at alternative modes, although there are several reasons to discourage jitneys.

Re: African Bus Routes Redrawn Using Cell-Phone Data

#33

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Apr 30, 2013, 7:36 PM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #29

trailfox wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of them, yes. Most 12 year olds from my country are taught the names of all countries in the world and where to find them on a map and the names of the capital cities.

The I guess I'm less intelligent than most of the 12 year old kids in your country, because to be honest there's more relevant things I still have yet to learn before I get around to memorizing the name, location, and capital city of all 195(?) nations in the world and keep this information updated in my mind when, for example, a regime change in Central Africa means the name of the country is now different or what w…

[deleted]

Re: African Bus Routes Redrawn Using Cell-Phone Data

#34

Post by freehunter » Wed, May 01, 2013, 12:46 PM UTC

stephenhuey wrote: post #31

freehunter wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the real kicker: if I don't know where the country is, why would I care enough to google it? "Africa" in this situation gives me more info than the name of the country would.

You never look up things you don't recognize? I care to look things up every day, and before the web I used physical dictionaries and encyclopedias on a frequent basis. Some people may never feel that inquisitive, but quite a lot of us are, and I'd imagine most people on HN are like that.

There's a lot of articles posted to HN every day that I don't understand. If I researched them all, I'd have no time to actually do something productive. I skip them and move on unless something else about it catches my eye.

Re: African Bus Routes Redrawn Using Cell-Phone Data

#35

Post by trailfox » Thu, May 02, 2013, 6:28 PM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #29

trailfox wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of them, yes. Most 12 year olds from my country are taught the names of all countries in the world and where to find them on a map and the names of the capital cities.

The I guess I'm less intelligent than most of the 12 year old kids in your country, because to be honest there's more relevant things I still have yet to learn before I get around to memorizing the name, location, and capital city of all 195(?) nations in the world and keep this information updated in my mind when, for example, a regime change in Central Africa means the name of the country is now different or what w…

>I guess I'm less intelligent than most of the 12 year old kids in your country

I think you just hit the nail on the head.