[LINK] OT: ACTION Bus Timetables

[Roger Clarke]

At 19:21 +1100 25/10/10, Ash Nallawalla wrote:
>Giving them the benefit of the doubt, can you see where the current
>timetable works like a charm for some other combinations of bus-changes?  It
>would make a good project for a CompSci class (cue TomW) to design the best
>schedule.

I did some Ops Research in my youth, and it's a truism that you can 
only maximise a single criterion ('optimise a mathematically 
definable objective function' might be closer to applied maths 
expression).

Scheduling, in any real-world context, doesn't fit that condition; 
to it's not feasible to solve all problems with one solution.

My grizzle was above all about the user information services and user 
interface aspects, which are pretty straightforward analysis and 
design matters.

Where the scheduling is concerned, I *do* have a problem with their 
design if it's not based on some coherent conception of what the 
primary target markets are.  (And I agree there are some 
resource/space constraints that have to be allowed for as well as 
time-and-place constraints, as Ash's example below shows rather 
nicely).

This is a government-run bus operation, and it therefore has social 
as well as economic aims, and indeed environmental aims too.  So 
simplistic (i.e. economists') notions like profit maximisation or 
even revenue maximisation are irrelevant.

A reasonable response on the scheduling aspects could be something like:

'The following are the primary target markets that we designed for: 
...  You've highlighted inconvenience - on a run to the smallest of 
the valleys that make up Canberra - for a small number of arrivals on 
the creaky and often-late Sydney train.  That's a side-effect of the 
design, for which we're sorry, but that's how it is'.

Rest assured that if I get any kind of response that makes my 
20-minute analysis look awry or unfair, I'll let you know.

But, if you're a betting man, don't hold your breath.


>Before my daughter got her full driving licence, she used to take the
>VicRail train to Geelong and miss the bus to Deakin Uni by 3 minutes.  The
>next one was something like 45 minutes later, so she often called on her
>brother or classmates to give her a lift.  This apparent craziness made more
>sense when we saw the tiny bus stop on a narrow road at the Geelong campus
>and how it could not sustain several buses all arriving at once. These buses
>went to other destinations in Geelong and the one for the railway station
>had to get its own time slot and not stuff up the other buses.


-- 
Roger Clarke                                 http://www.rogerclarke.com/

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Visiting Professor in the Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre      Uni of NSW
Visiting Professor in Computer Science    Australian National University