How One City Saved $5 Million by Routing School Buses with an Algorithm (routefifty.com) 85
The Boston Public School District held a contest to determine the best solution for busing around 25,000 students to school every day. The winning algorithm improved the efficiency of the routes in 30 minutes. From a report: In 2017, the district was facing serious challenges. On a per-pupil basis, Boston Public Schools had the highest transportation costs in the country, around $2,000 per student per year, representing 10% of the district's budget. The schools dealt with rising costs each year, despite declining ridership. The on-time performance rate of their buses was also well below that of other large districts. With no clear vendor to turn to with this problem, BPS instead sought out experts, hosting a competition where researchers could experiment with anonymized BPS data sets to create efficient routes and optimal start times for each school.
"To put it simply, we wanted a solution that worked," said Will Eger, the BPS senior strategic projects manager. "There are lots of quirks in this transportation situation, and we wanted something that could address the vast majority of those issues while also being highly efficient, something that could run overnight at least." Those quirks represent millions of decision variables that affect any solution, including varying road widths, differing bus infrastructures (for example, the presence of wheelchair lifts or child safety restraint seats), students who require the same bus driver every year, students who have monitors, and students who have been in fights and, therefore, need to be on different buses. It also includes the roughly 5,000 students who have a special need that requires door-to-door pick up and drop off (sometimes to non-BPS schools, as the city provides yellow bus service to students who attend charter and private schools within Boston, and to special education facilities outside the city).
Considering all those possibilities creates a "number of solutions so large that you can't even enumerate it," said Arthur Delarue, a PhD candidate who worked with the team from the MIT Operations Research Center whose algorithm won the competition. The team spent hundreds of hours devising a solution to what Delarue called a "bold and unusual" challenge. Their solution replaced what had before been an incredibly laborious process, one that took ten school system routers thousands of hours to create custom routes for each child and school. Those employees still work with BPS, tracking routes that struggle with on-time performance, and managing route guidance for drivers (Google Maps isn't sufficient since it's built for cars, and 70-passenger buses can't, for example, easily make u-turns). But now, the MIT algorithm routes the entire system at once, providing a base for the human routers to tweak.
"To put it simply, we wanted a solution that worked," said Will Eger, the BPS senior strategic projects manager. "There are lots of quirks in this transportation situation, and we wanted something that could address the vast majority of those issues while also being highly efficient, something that could run overnight at least." Those quirks represent millions of decision variables that affect any solution, including varying road widths, differing bus infrastructures (for example, the presence of wheelchair lifts or child safety restraint seats), students who require the same bus driver every year, students who have monitors, and students who have been in fights and, therefore, need to be on different buses. It also includes the roughly 5,000 students who have a special need that requires door-to-door pick up and drop off (sometimes to non-BPS schools, as the city provides yellow bus service to students who attend charter and private schools within Boston, and to special education facilities outside the city).
Considering all those possibilities creates a "number of solutions so large that you can't even enumerate it," said Arthur Delarue, a PhD candidate who worked with the team from the MIT Operations Research Center whose algorithm won the competition. The team spent hundreds of hours devising a solution to what Delarue called a "bold and unusual" challenge. Their solution replaced what had before been an incredibly laborious process, one that took ten school system routers thousands of hours to create custom routes for each child and school. Those employees still work with BPS, tracking routes that struggle with on-time performance, and managing route guidance for drivers (Google Maps isn't sufficient since it's built for cars, and 70-passenger buses can't, for example, easily make u-turns). But now, the MIT algorithm routes the entire system at once, providing a base for the human routers to tweak.
Boston is not like other cities (Score:1)
Re:Boston is not like other cities (Score:5, Informative)
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Pah, that is less than 400 years. You should visit Europe where some cities have street layouts that are basically still Roman in origin, and medieval is par for the course.
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The insult is you pretending to be smart
*your; emphasis added mine
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I neither wrote "you're", or "your", I wrote "you", as in "The insult is the person who wrote the post pretending to be smart." If you are going to try to be pedantic I'm fine with that, but don't fail miserably as you did in this case.
LOL. You're truly showing what an ass you are. And that's the only reason I even poked at you. You were being an ass, so I figured I'd call you out on a trivial mistake you made and see what you do with that. And boy did you ever deliver! It's OK. Accept that you're an ass and act accordingly. Oh, wait... :D
I know full well you didn't write "you're" or "your". That's why I corrected you. You should have used "your". Consider the basic sentence structure.
The insult is pretending.
That's broken down
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Re: Boston is not like other cities (Score:1)
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You didn't say existence. Now, if you had said his existence was an insult, great. But you didn't. You said "the insult is you".
What? No, that's not right...you said the insult was his pretending (note how I used the possessive "his" with the noun "pretending"). You didn't say the insult was his existence and that he was pretending. You said the insult *was* his pretending. You can't say "the insult is you" and figure that means "the insult is your existence". You can try to twist it in your head l
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Dude, it's "you're" if you are trying to correct his grammar, but as the guy said, that's not what he has trying to say
Don't you English?
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Ralph Waldo Emerson, in 1860 wrote: “We say the cows laid out Boston. Well, there are worse surveyors.”
See, you already lost the debate. The cow didn't even have to show up.
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That leads to the (ha
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Actually, the GP may not be far off. People would settle around the easiest places to commute to/from. Generally, even retarded cows would follow those same paths.
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You learn something new everyday!
And here all this time I'd been under the false impression that Boston had been planned out by intellectually challenged chimps. Who knew?
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Most cities are planned by someone with a greater then moron IQ. Boston on the other hand was layed out by what can only be described as retarded cows.
In a way, it was designed by cows.. Or horse paths, which followed the easiest routes, usually made by wildlife. These where not engineered, they are legacy.
Boston was initially laid out prior to the founding of the USA. Downtown was driven by the needs of the day, not the needs of today. If it was a clean sheet design, I'm sure today we'd lay out Boston totally different. But it's easier to keep the legacy and not mess around with age old property lines, infrastructure locations and long standing paths.
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Exactly. Boston is older than urban planning in the US.
There may be worse cities. San Francisco, anyone? Brooklyn? I would not want to run scheduling apps there...
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Philadelphia
Re: Boston is not like other cities (Score:2)
Yup. Same problems.
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Says someone who can't spell "laid"....
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Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
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I went to school by public bus, as did/do most of the people I know.
I went to school by walking or riding my bike, as did most of the people I know. Now it seems kids either take a schoolbus or their parents drive them.
Re:Thanks for using the right term (Score:5, Insightful)
But seriously, why would any student "need" the same driver each year??
I see this more of an issue with students with special needs. I have a nephew with severe autism. It takes him a long time to learn to trust new people. He had a dedicated bus driver for the duration of each year.
Too far to walk (Score:3)
I went to school by walking or riding my bike, as did most of the people I know. Now it seems kids either take a schoolbus or their parents drive them.
You can do that if you live in a dense urban area or just by luck happen to live near a school. My school district covers 107 square miles. Not to mention we live in the upper Midwest where winters are a real thing. Kids drive to school or take the bus because there is no practical alternative.
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I went to school by public bus, as did/do most of the people I know.
I went to school by walking or riding my bike, as did most of the people I know. Now it seems kids either take a schoolbus or their parents drive them.
I walked to elementary school (less than a mile away). My intermediate and high school was in two villages over - 90% of that distance on a highway. I paid 10 cents a day each way for school bus (city bus would have been 25 cents each way). There were a few times when I walked home from high school following the beach. I don't believe my parents ever drove me to school.
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I think (perhaps completely wrong) that there will be students where the public transport overlaps the school busses. Giving the kids a yearly pass might be cheaper. It would result in more public busses, so that is a plus as well for the community.
I like the way you think. Alas, that's not legal in America. Unless the parent can pick the child up at school, the school is responsible for the children (getting them home, or keeping them at after-school-care in some form). Often, car-line (parents waiting in queue to pick up their children from school) is a looong line of cars, in some cases taking hours to get through. Even in those situations, if the parent wanted to pull over on the side of the road right by the school, it's illegal for the schoo
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So, what you're saying is that there are a lot of rules in place that make the world a living hell, because "good intentions" are all that matter.
We see this all the time, and it is one of biggest problems we have as a society. We keep putting more and more responsibility on the corporate body (government) and removing it from people. This nanny state approach rarely works as advertised and yet we keep doing it thinking it makes everything better.
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So, what you're saying is that there are a lot of rules in place that make the world a living hell, because "good intentions" are all that matter.
No. The biggest problem comes from lawsuits. If the school allows the kids to walk off the campus to go to their parent's car and has some kind of accident, the school could be sued and the answer is strict and stupid rules to CYA.
No "good intentions" here...
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Alas, that's not true. Several school districts in the US use public buses for student transportation: Portland, ME, Minneapolis, MN, New York, NY, Oakland, CA, Washington DC, etc. Though it is typically not done for elementary/primary school students.
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Actually, I was only thinking of elementary age kids, but it applies to all students in the school system that are on a bus, at least where I'm from (Alabama (and the crowd goes wild)).
Pretty interesting to know that there are states that allow this. Are these bus companies in a contract with the schools? Seems like they'd have to be. If they are, then my point is still valid, as the contract that the bus companies are under, would simply be an extension of the school's responsibility to the students.
The
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Not illegal to walk (Score:2)
I like the way you think. Alas, that's not legal in America.
Not true. Not true at all.
Unless the parent can pick the child up at school, the school is responsible for the children (getting them home, or keeping them at after-school-care in some form).
They are only responsible for them on school grounds and under certain conditions contingent on local regulations.
Even in those situations, if the parent wanted to pull over on the side of the road right by the school, it's illegal for the schools to allow the kids to walk off the campus to go to their parent's car.
No it's not illegal - not universally so anyway - certainly not where I live. We have kids who walk home from school in our district and parents could do exactly what you describe legally. It's all about your local regulations and some areas are more strict than others. I coach sports teams at a high school and jr high and I've never been at a school where the kid c
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I think a post above said it best:
The biggest problem comes from lawsuits. If the school allows the kids to walk off the campus to go to their parent's car and has some kind of accident, the school could be sued and the answer is strict and stupid rules to CYA.
You're right, it's probably just a matter of local policy, rather than a law. But they enforce it like it's law.
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It might be 'illegal' where you live but it's not the case in all of "America". I know of school districts that absolutely use the local area's public transportation (in the cases I know of, it's buses) and pay for it. They worked with the bus system for discounted costs, of course. At our school district, kids get to school (at least) three different ways: Walkers, parent drop-off, and bussed. It's certainly not "illegal" for parents to drive their kids close to the school, drop them, and they walk the rem
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No, I was wrong. It's not a law, just a local policy at the school(s). A poster above worded it nicely:
The biggest problem comes from lawsuits. If the school allows the kids to walk off the campus to go to their parent's car and has some kind of accident, the school could be sued and the answer is strict and stupid rules to CYA.
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Some schools do use public transportation for students. At least in Philadelphia :
https://www.septa.org/fares/di... [septa.org]
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The MBTA offers Student Passes at $30 / student. By way of example, in 2015 there were 54,312 students in the system. Purchasing a pass for every student would therefore cost about 20 Million per year, and would not solve some of their issues. For example the rivalry issue would be made worse as a bullied student would be forced to wait for a train or bus, unsupervised, with his bullies. They would, of
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54K students at $30 per doesn't come anywhere near $20M. It doesn't even reach $2M....
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Congratulations on finding the least important part of this story and claiming it was the most important.
The MBTA offers Student Passes at $30 / student. By way of example, in 2015 there were 54,312 students in the system. Purchasing a pass for every student would therefore cost about 20 Million per year, and would not solve some of their issues. For example the rivalry issue would be made worse as a bullied student would be forced to wait for a train or bus, unsupervised, with his bullies. They would, of course, still have to provide public transportation, and the associated overhead, and every student would have to get a pass because discrimination / it's not fair.
Given that the story is about how they recognize the problem and held a contest as part of a comprehensive approach to addressing the issue, it is quaint that you think you both identified the most important part of the story and had an idea that never occurred to BPS management. For the record, I was able to determine all this without using AI, which is of course, the most important thing to take away from my post.
The most important thing to take away from your post is that you have an overdeveloped sense of your own self importance and opinion.
Someone mentioned that some school districts should consider using public transportation, someone else said that they can't because it's illegal.
I simply provided empirical evidence to suggest that neither was true.
Post not directed to me? Then learn how to be a better douche bag and quote the parent.
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Thanks for using the right term
The right term here bing "Algorithm" and not "AI" as we often see in these situations.
Took the words right out of my fingertips.
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It really depends on where you are in the US. Where I grew up, there was very little public transportation other than the yellow school bus and the senior dial-a-ride. The population just wasn't dense enough at the time to support public transportation that would run often enough to be useful. A friend went to school in NYC and I believe that she used public transportation. Where I currently live, it's mostly yellow school buses for grades up through 12 but there is a fairly decent public transportation sys
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That's an option, and if it lets the teenagers kids sleep in later, they might. But it's not likely to happen for younger students. It also happens to overlap with rush hour, where many MBTA (the local pubic transit system) buses will already be full. The T's bus network is also pretty wonky, and does not align well with some school locations (let alone the various private schools that BPS apparently serves), as can be seen in this Google Map with KML overlays; the uniquely colored routes run every 10-15 mi
sounds like classic manager ivory tower (Score:1)
if you ask the drivers they would probably tell you ways to speed things up. I bet the people who made the routes tried to do it all themselves and when it didn't work the solution is to pay consultants.
Is it a super rough town or full of snowflakes? (Score:3, Interesting)
students who require the same bus driver every year, students who have monitors, and students who have been in fights and, therefore, need to be on different buses
I'm totally lost on this one; how does a student require the same driver every year?
And how does getting in a fight warrant getting a new bus route?! What, the other 70 kids to fill the bus get taken out of their way because two kids had a scuffle and discipline is so completely broken that the only effective solution is this kind of separation?
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There ought to be a law (rule, regulation etc) and it was so.
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students who require the same bus driver every year, students who have monitors, and students who have been in fights and, therefore, need to be on different buses
I'm totally lost on this one; how does a student require the same driver every year?
And how does getting in a fight warrant getting a new bus route?! What, the other 70 kids to fill the bus get taken out of their way because two kids had a scuffle and discipline is so completely broken that the only effective solution is this kind of separation?
I can see needing the "same driver" for special needs students who have emotional issues involving trust etc. But I'm also lost with the fighting requirement. If enough fights break out you could DoS the entire bus routing.
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Back in my day, you got suspended from the bus for fighting. There were times when our driver would pull over to the side of the road and radio the transportation office. We would wait in an un-airconditioned bus in the Florida sun waiting for security to remove the problem children. Problem children did not get to use the bus. Their parents had to make "alternative" arrangements.
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Same here. And you may or may not have cared about the suspension, but, GOOD LAWD!, you paid hell for Mama having to cart your narrow ass to school every day for two weeks. A half hour of stink eye every morning for two weeks is Gitmo worthy TORTURE, I'm telling you.
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students who require the same bus driver every year, students who have monitors, and students who have been in fights and, therefore, need to be on different buses
I'm totally lost on this one; how does a student require the same driver every year?
Could be autistic and doesn't do well with strangers. Can take a while for kids with autism to become comfortable with new people, and of course any change to routine is a big deal. It might be easier to just make sure the student has the same driver every year over having to get them acclimated to a new driver every year.
Re:Is it a super rough town or full of snowflakes? (Score:4, Informative)
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kids from one gang can't be on the bus as kids from the other gang
Prison bus with cages.
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how does a student require the same driver every year?
I'm guessing special needs. Trust issues, drivers trained to deal with various conditions or medical problems, that sort of thing.
Expel those who refuse to behave. (Score:2)
Why are criminals going to school in the first place? As a motivated student I hated disruptive losers and what they take away from kids with futures. We need to isolate criminals, not include them, and every assault in school should be prosecuted.
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So you want to ensure that "criminals" remain uneducated and unemployable. That's real smart thinking.
What did they do with the savings? (Score:4, Insightful)
The district reinvested the $5 million saved back into classroom initiatives.
Translation: Football fields. School districts always find money for football fields but not for educational supplies and reducing classroom size.
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Teachers get paid shit everywhere. If you don't think so, please quit your current job and become a teacher. Good luck trying to pay off that student loan for the bachelor's in education you had to get. Oh, and don't forget that you'll be using part of your own salary to pay for supplies.
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Having grown up in the northeast (or mid-atlantic, if you prefer) I can confirm that you aren't wrong here. Teachers there didn't get paid well. My brother became a teacher in a neighboring state, he did a bit better in that higher CoL area but still wasn't raking it in.
The high school I attended has a massive football stadium. Despite dwindling and aging local population, this rust-belt district anomalously just built a whole building attached to the stadium for "offices". Even 40 years ago they poured
Old news? (Score:5, Informative)
https://yro.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
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https://yro.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
A bit of an update on old news I think. Seems the story took a bit of the old up and down route... First hailed by people as a great leap forward. Then realizing that the disruptive change was a bit too disruptive to people. In the end once the technique was refined to limit and mitigate the downsides it was overall a beneficial change.
Well, some sdvice (Score:2)
Had they consulted with one of the ADA (or non-emergency medical) transport providers in the Boston area, they would have found these organizations regularly solve for these variables, and the school bus problem is simpler:
- Boston is a difficult geography, one-way streets, obstacles such as parks, bridges, and of course the eastern border, the Atlantic Ocean, I-95/Rt 128/etc...
- Geography like this means the routing is not rectilinear, so it gets very interesting. Add in speed zones and you get an interest
It's the old addage (Score:1)
NIMBY caused a Racist Implementation (Score:4, Insightful)
The school figured out a way to drop the number of kids going to school before 8 AM from over 70% to 6%. But the wealthier schools objected to later times, (as late as 8:45, the horror) so they rejected that plan, forcing poor kids (mostly darker skin colors) to be at school before 8 AM (which correlates to lower performance in school - mainly due to lack of sleep)
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But the wealthier schools objected to later times, (as late as 8:45, the horror) so they rejected that plan
Do you have a source for that? In my area, the wealthy parents were mostly in favor of later start times (as you mention, research indicates that high schoolers especially benefit from this). What killed it here was teacher objections (they would be dealing with worse traffic) and the difficulty of bus scheduling which would have increased transportation costs. Maybe they could have fixed that part with this algorithm.
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https://apps.bostonglobe.com/i... [bostonglobe.com]
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I find that hard to believe. My oldest just started kindergarten and the reason the bus comes so early is for poor kids to get the chance to have free breakfast before classes start. So classes start at 8:30 but the bus gets to school around 7:55. The "wealthier" kids who had breakfast at home sit around doing busy work until class starts. Some parents deal with this by driving their kids so that they can get there closer to the real start time.
Now I would agree that earlier start times help out lower-middl
Boston's Poor Training of Human Schedulers (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a friend who was a principle for a BPS school. She explained to me the problems that she was having with busing. She was seeing three primary issues.
1 - Buses were consistently late getting kids to the school.
2 - Buses would arrive at stops way too early, leaving kids behind.
3 - Buses would arrive at stops way too late, causing the parents who were waiting with their kids to be late to work.
When she looked into it, she discovered the issue that was causing all of the problems. Fully one third of the buses had their routes reversed. The first pick-ups on the inbound routes were the stops closest to the school, and the last pick-ups were the stops farthest away.
Some buses ran according to the published schedule. After the last stop which was farthest away from the school, the bus would have to turn around and drive all the way back to the school. Those buses were consistently late. (Issue #1 above.) Other bus drivers took it upon themselves to reverse the route to make it more efficient. For the kids who were supposed to be picked up at 7:00, the bus arrived at 7:30. For the kids who were supposed to be picked up at 7:30, the bus arrived at 7:00. (Issues # 2 & 3 above.)
My principal friend rerouted all of the buses herself making sure that all of the buses started far away from the school and worked their way closer to the school as they went. All of the issues were resolved.
I don't know if the human schedulers were temps or if they were full time workers who only worked on the bus schedules during the summer, but clearly some of them were not trained properly on how to schedule a school bus. Allowing a computer to do it couldn't help but make it better.
when did Boston earn the Voldemort treatment? (Score:2)
Just when did Boston earn the "one city" Voldemort treatment?
Catholic Archdiocese of Boston sex abuse scandal [wikipedia.org]
On second thought, forget I asked.
This was proposed last year and was REJECTED (Score:2)
Very little savings to what's possible (Score:2)
They're still paying 10 people just to keep them employed. Additionally, the union won't let them reduce bus drivers so their major savings is fuel.
Maps and way finding for commercial routes exist. You could put all sorts of restrictions on your "vehicles" including size, height and things like the chemicals they carry to make sure they don't get stuck under a bridge or violate local ordinances.
They exist but between unions and stingy school boards they won't see much use and thus no vendor will spring up t