[muawiyah]

The real issue here is the politicians would rather spend billions on trains to nowhere carrying few passengers than toss a few bucks into the till to work up scheduling algorithms that can make existing bus service better, and in the long run, create conditions underwhich bus service can actually be profitable.

Three decades ago I worked out a way a public school district could make use of the techniques designed by the USPS to route and schedule carrier delivery service ~ the purpose would be to make sure that even on the first day of school no kids were left waiting at a bus stop where no bus ever arrived.

My professor thought it was an excellent idea since local school transportation planners could simply call the local post office to consult with an expert in the way the system worked.

Call it a federal/state cooperative technology symposium.

Within a couple of years the prof convinced the state to adopt the method, and since then we haven't had those first day of school disasters, and costs of running school bus systems have declined (relative to inflation).

The municipal bus systems have never shown any interest in this. They answer first to the top end managers, not to the market need.

[dirtboy]

You would never get hired by a mass transit authority. They constantly tweak schedules, with the tweaks almost always making the schedules worse.