
One City Saved $5M by Routing School Buses with an Algorithm - emrosecoleman
https://www.routefifty.com/tech-data/2019/08/boston-school-bus-routes/159113/
======
b_tterc_p
Here’s an article about some MIT folks who tried to do this and were shut down
by annoying rich people.

My greatest frustration is that they complain about black box algorithms when
in fact it is a perfectly clear, ambiguity-free optimization function.

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/story/joi-ito-
ai-...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/story/joi-ito-ai-and-bus-
routes/amp)

~~~
joe_the_user
Oh I remember this story. Back then when I dug into it, it was a real spin-
versus-spin situation.

Sure, when you introduce an approach that suddenly creates considerable
inconvenience for some population of parents, sure they complain (no one
_likes_ having to drop off kids at ~ vaguely recalling ~ 10 am and pick at 5
pm, sheesh, it was something terrible). Some large portion of working people
are fairly dependent their children having ordinary school schedules. Maybe
these were relatively better off parents in the public school system - where
the actually wealthy use private schools (I know Boston well enough to attest
to this). So the algorithm failed to "optimize for those they could
effectively screw" but hey, would it be too much to ask to just give all
schools a sane schedule? Maybe pony up that extra money, give up the need to
optimize everything, keep the tail of bus optimization from wagging the dog of
school scheduling?

~~~
yardstick
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.

~~~
Dylan16807
It's a change between years, and students moving to high school are already
facing the exact same changes. The disparity can't be a non-starter because it
already existed.

Those early hours exist. Someone has to take them (without doubling the bus
fleet size). And it's better for the students if they have the early hours in
elementary and not in high school.

~~~
yardstick
Rather than penalise subsets of people with early starts, I would rather
everyone pay marginally more in taxes for more buses.

Also what if your family has both teenagers and preteens? In my family we
drove, so the schedule was based on when my parents had to go to work. I’d
often arrive at school when the library opened or just before, which is a good
hour before when classes started. Then again, my school experience wasn’t in
the US, and schools started 8:30am / 8:45am consistently across the city.

~~~
smileysteve
> Also what if your family has both teenagers and preteens?

"When I was a kid" preteens and teenagers were expected to be able to get to
the bus stop on their own; But maybe that's just because both of my parents
worked and left before the bus came.

------
seltzered_
“After it was unveiled parents loudly objected to the proposal. Less than a
month later, the district repealed the proposed new school start times. As
Dimitris Bertsimas, a professor who led the MIT team, pointed out in a
presentation about the solution, those who favored the status quo had the most
to lose. “When your kids are affected negatively, it is hard to see the big
picture,” he said.”

Joi Ito wrote on this [https://joi.ito.com/weblog/2018/12/05/what-the-boston-
school...](https://joi.ito.com/weblog/2018/12/05/what-the-boston-school-bus-
schedule-can-teach-us-about-ai.html) :

“In very polite email, they told me that I didn’t have the whole story.

Kade and I met later that month with Arthur, Sebastien, and their adviser, MIT
professor Dimitris Bertsimas. One of the first things they showed us was a
photo of the parents who had protested against the schedules devised by the
algorithm. Nearly all of them were white. The majority of families in the
Boston school system are not white. White families represent only about 15
percent the public school population in the city. Clearly something was off.”

“Optimizing the algorithm for greater “equity" also meant many of the planned
changes were "biased" against families with privilege. My view is that the
fact that an algorithm was making decisions also upset people. And the
families who were happy with the new schedule probably didn’t pay as much
attention. The families who were upset marched on City Hall in an effort to
overturn the planned changes.”

~~~
frgtpsswrdlame
>Optimizing the algorithm for greater “equity" also meant many of the planned
changes were "biased" against families with privilege.

I mean maybe but measuring that by the skin color of those protesting is...
not a good method. Of course people marching on City Hall or showing up at
schoolboard meetings are going to be the disproportionately privileged,
they're the people who have the time for that sort of thing. But even there
I'm a bit skeptical, take a look at this:

>Parent Antonia Rodriguez after a fiery address. She says of her and fellow
parents, “We don’t have careers; we have jobs!... We’re laborers!” And that
makes it hard to handle early starts and early dismissals.

or this video just below:

[https://twitter.com/jmlarkin/status/941104843137064960](https://twitter.com/jmlarkin/status/941104843137064960)

which gets to the main root of the opposition which was drastically earlier
start and end times for elementary school students, two hours earlier in some
cases.

>But for those who can’t stagger working hours — specifically single parents
or families who don’t have any wiggle room on working hours — kids often see
themselves to bus stops in the morning, then wait an hour or so after school,
alone, until parents return. I see it every day.

>Under the new start times, and therefore early end times, these kids will be
spending up to four hours home alone every day.

>Let’s not sugarcoat: After-school care is for financially advantaged
families. Costs vary, but for two children at the YMCA in West Roxbury, after-
school care from 3:25 p.m. until 6 p.m. is more than $700 per month (the cost
would naturally go up with the extension of hours needed), plus the yearly
membership cost of the YMCA (currently $90 per family).

...

>And for what? So Boston Public School can save a little in transportation
expenses. And while they save, families will find themselves in increasingly
precarious financial straits.

[https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2017/12/12/boston-public-
sc...](https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2017/12/12/boston-public-school-
johannah-haney)

Or this analysis from the Boston NAACP, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil
Rights and Economic Justice, and the East Boston Ecumenical Community Council:

>This ignores the fact that parents of color are disproportionately in lower-
wage jobs, and are less likely to have the flexibility needed to build their
schedules around a school day that ends at 1:15 or 1:55, let alone pay for any
resulting need in after school care

[https://www.boston.com/news/education/2017/12/16/naacp-
lette...](https://www.boston.com/news/education/2017/12/16/naacp-letter-
condemning-new-boston-public-school-start-times)

\---

Now it's clear that BPS used the MIT students here as a tool, a coating of
algorithmic sophistication over a plan they already had, but it strikes me a
bit poorly to see those students using 'actually we did everything right, it's
just rich parents who stopped us' as a scapegoat.

~~~
seltzered_
Thanks for sharing this. I don't live in Boston so I haven't closely tracked
all the views on BPS.

------
mattlondon
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 coordination to make sure buses stop at/very near schools,
and they may send extra ones at certain times - e.g. there were often several
buses parked up and waiting empty at my school so they could be filled at the
end of the school day, but any member of the public was then able to get
onboard once it was on its usual route after that, and if you were late
getting out (e.g. detention/sports etc) you'd just wait at the stop outside
the school for the usual bus on its usual route to come by.

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

~~~
jefftk
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.

~~~
GarrisonPrime
My father was a school bus driver. The pickup and drop off routes were often 3
hours each, as they were mandated by local law to provide service to the whole
country.

Kindergarten is just half a day in many places, so the middle of the day would
be another 3 hours to shift those around.

There were also many field trips, sporting events, and other miscellaneous
calls for transport throughout the day and into the evenings, as well as some
weekends.

Much of all of this would vary quite a bit depending on a particular town’s
location, population needs, layout, etc. but I just wanted to say that
although it’s a relatively chill job and there is indeed often a lot of
downtime, it’s not like bus drivers universally work 1 hr in the morning, 1 hr
in the afternoon, and then just bum around all day.

~~~
pnutjam
All the districts in my area are begging for school bus drivers. The pay is
going up and some are offering full time benefits for driving part time. I've
also seen them offering to split the morning / afternoon shift and paying
teachers extra to drive buses instead of coach after school sports.

------
ndjskska
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)

~~~
joe_the_user
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
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!

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, frozen rain,
slush and all manner of nastiness. Plus horrible hot, humid summers. So you
have to avoid walking a lot.

4) Boston experienced court-order busing to end segregation in the 1970s, so
it's often true that students aren't in schools closest to them
geographically.

~~~
mac01021
Isn't Boston's climate very similar to most of Germany's?

~~~
msl
One thing I have learned from reading (and occasionally taking part in) these
discussions is that _no, it is not_. The US is _different_. It is too big, too
small, too densely populated, too sparsely populated, too hot, too cold, too
dry and too humid for anything to work. It does not matter if something
appears to work most everywhere else. It will not work anywhere in the US.

~~~
dtwest
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 more extreme in most places of the US than Europe. When
Europeans tell people in Wisconsin to "just take an electric scooter to the
metro station" they understandably laugh it off as ridiculous.

~~~
dx034
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.

~~~
magashna
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

~~~
dsfyu404ed
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".

~~~
lonelappde
In Bangor or Buffalo there is very little "business as usual". Boston is far
more dense and optimized with less slack in the system.

I bet that the activity in Boston when it is "shut down" due to weather is
still busier than an average day in Bangor or Buffalo.

------
morisy
The end of the article notes the whole plan was scrapped based on parental
feedback.

More background:

[https://www.media.mit.edu/articles/what-the-boston-school-
bu...](https://www.media.mit.edu/articles/what-the-boston-school-bus-schedule-
can-teach-us-about-ai/)

~~~
ac29
Thats not quite right - they did optimize bus routing and did save $5M. But
when "the algorithm" suggested further improvements that required changing
school start times (presumably so that the same bus and driver could work
multiple routes to multiple schools), there was pushback and those changes
weren't implemented.

~~~
ShinTakuya
That's really sad, there's so much to be gained by staggering school start and
end times. Even in places where school buses aren't used - for instance,
burden can be reduced on public transport among other things.

~~~
msh
But school start and end times need to fit somewhat with the parents worklife
and out of school activities, they do not exist in a vacuum.

------
simonebrunozzi
This is hardly new. Back in 2001 I almost ended up working for an Italian
company, based in Florence, which successfully implemented a different routing
for public buses in Rimini (another Italian city) using linear programming and
genetic algorithms.

The field has been explored, and a number of solutions have existed for at
least ~25 years.

What's impressive in this article, instead, is the amount of savings; $5M is
not small change.

~~~
EvanAnderson
Having done some work in truck route optimization in the retail / wholesale
petroleum delivery space I'm a little shocked that their inefficiency was so
bad to begin with. (There are some really fun problems in this space.
Traveling salesman meets bin packing, just for starters.)

~~~
tgtweak
These are often done by hand, I'm really not surprised.

~~~
hinkley
You can also see this effect in Google and Apple maps:

There may be three ways to get from one neighborhood to another, and the
locals know that one is faster, safer, or both at certain times of day.

I have this argument with a couple of friends who don't understand why I use
different routes at different times of day and specifically why I don't use
_their_ route, when they've never been in that part of town during rush hour.

~~~
jdeibele
I lived in this city for many years. I was born here. The problem is, there
are now so many other people who live here that what was once great shortcuts
aren't any longer. It's been a shift to "light traffic = unusual" from "avoid
rush hour and you'll be OK".

I am getting used to checking Google Maps before going anywhere near a
freeway. Just a few days ago, I noticed that traffic heading south seemed bad
as I was going north to drop off my daughters. I checked Google Maps and it
said that going south on the freeway was fastest. I dithered and then got on
the freeway. The choke point that was there 25 minutes ago was gone and I
saved a bunch of time staying off surfaced roads.

The state highway department has cameras and road reports and announcements of
construction. 20 years ago, I would have been on their website. Now I don't
have to. I just use Google Maps.

I'm an iPhone user and I do try to use Apple Maps more often because of
privacy concerns.

------
dfeojm-zlib
Could've used this 30 years ago when I was forcibly-bused across town to a
"magnet" school 1.5 hours in each direction (3 hours of busing total). Getting
up a 4:45 am and not getting home until after 6 pm as a pre-teen sucked. The
big thing is the route they took was very circuitous and served both many
stops and schools.

------
remote_phone
The automation of this is great and saves time and money.

But this highlights the exact problem that Andrew Yang, the Democratic
Candidate is highlighting which is: what do we do with people whose jobs are
lost to automation and algorithms?

His proposal of universal basic income helps these people who have lost their
jobs attempt a soft landing because at least they will have some income.

I used to be against UBI but now I fully understand why we need it, because
too many jobs are going to be eliminated, and what do we do with these people
who have lost their jobs? They are likely older with lower skills, and
retraining programs are statistically an abject failure.

~~~
notahacker
We could start by not underestimating human capacity to invent new jobs. Long
before algorithms were a thing, automation largely eliminated agricultural and
domestic servant jobs that used to employ the vast majority of people

And the welfare state wasn't invented by Andrew Yang: only difference is his
variant assumes people who are desperate to find work and people that have
absolutely no need to or intention of doing anything other than live off their
savings or family wealth have exactly the same need for subsidies...

------
vmurthy
Here's something that UPS is doing [1] and something FedEx is doing [2]

(these two should know a few things about route optimization :-)

"Another proprietary tool UPS uses to manage its fleet system is ORION (On-
road Integrated Optimization and Navigation)...The cost and time savings and
emission reduction based on this optimization alone is extraordinary—UPS
expects to reduce delivery miles by 100 million"

[1] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2018/06/15/the-
bril...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2018/06/15/the-brilliant-
ways-ups-uses-artificial-intelligence-machine-learning-and-big-
data/#7fc83a9a5e6d)

[2][https://routific.com/stories/fedex-
courier/](https://routific.com/stories/fedex-courier/)

~~~
superpermutat0r
It's not whole FedEx. It's one office.

------
axaxs
I'm a bit curious on school bus thoughts by area. Where I'm at now, it seems
like they don't want to run them at all. They put the best schools up as
'choice school' lottery, which means no bus, and if you live within two miles
of a school, no bus. Even if you offer to pay. Of the 600 students in my
child's school, 400 spend 45 minutes in a line twice a day, most due to the
circumstances. Obviously not an effective use of time, or good for the
environment, I'm a bit taken back by just how awkward bussing is in the US. In
my previous city, a bus would travel 45 minutes to pick up a single kid.
Neither seems practical, really.

~~~
smelendez
Same. I grew up on Long Island taking the bus to school, as did every kid of
sub-driving age I knew. Under New York law, even private school students got
subsidized buses if the school was in some reasonable distance. We watched
sitcoms and movies from Pete and Pete to Christmas stories where kids took the
yellow bus to school.

Now I don't have kids, but plenty of my friends around the country do, and I'm
always shocked to learn that school buses don't seem to be an option. Either
they just don't exist in the district, or they require kids to cross major
commercial roads to get to a stop.

The depressing thing to me is parents sort of roll their eyes when I ask, like
this reasonable public amenity that everyone I grew up with relied on less
than 20 years ago is the equivalent of the neighborhood milkman.

------
malandrew
$2000 per student per year is insane for a bus service. That's like $10 a day.
You could probably UberPool every kid at that price since you'd have a high
utilization rate for two narrow 30 min to 1 hour windows each day.

~~~
lexapro
$200 would be more appropriate.

~~~
afterburner
That's like 50 cents per ride. There's a reason mass transit isn't that cheap.

------
analog31
When I was a summer intern for a county computer service facility in the early
80s, they had a big IBM mainframe, and a bespoke program for school bus
routing. Every summer, this program consumed a fair amount of the activity for
the facility, which contained more than a dozen individual school districts.

I don't know the extent to which it was capable of _optimizing_ the schedules,
but it was considered to be a pretty big deal. There was apparently a lot of
hand-coded logic for dealing with things like one-way streets and not wanting
bus stops on busy streets.

------
dvdhsu
This reminds me of one of my favorite startups:
[https://remix.com](https://remix.com)

------
jamisteven
Didnt FedEx or UPS do this same thing years back by eliminating left hand
turns?

------
izzydata
If they had taken $1M of that saved $5M and distributed it to all of the
families inconvenienced by this change I wonder if that would have affected
their opinion.

------
brandonclark_22
where was this when I was in school haha

------
jedberg
> Running the algorithm in the summer of 2017 allowed for the system to
> eliminate 50 buses

Or read another way: "Running the algorithm eliminated 50 jobs due to
automation".

This right here is what Yang is all about. The incredible loss of jobs due to
technology.

~~~
finolex1
I'm no economist, but that 5 million saved will be spent on other job creating
activities. Perhaps it won't be a 1:1 replacement, but it's certainly not the
elimination of 50 jobs.

~~~
jedberg
Yes, 50 bus driver jobs, which require maybe a high school education, was
replaced with teacher jobs, which require an education beyond bachelors. Those
aren't equivalent jobs. Those bus drivers are SOL because most of them aren't
interested in retraining.

~~~
isostatic
> most of them aren't interested in retraining

And this is the problem. Culturally many people seem quite happy to leave high
school and get a menial job. Those jobs are vanishing, just like jobs for
elementary school dropouts vanished decades ago.

Society doesn't need people who are unwilling to aim higher than driving a bus
for 50 years.

This doesn't mean everyone needs to have a phd -- there's plenty of jobs for
trained plumbers, electricians, mechanics etc, but those all require training
post high school.

