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That sounds quaintly conspiratorial, however it is incredibly complex to optimize bus routings, especially given financial limits most systems operate under. An
by corresation 13y ago
That sounds quaintly conspiratorial, however it is incredibly complex to optimize bus routings, especially given financial limits most systems operate under. Any change will always be at the detriment of someone else, and the last mile(s) problem is enormous.
- arnsholt 13y agoLogistics is hard in general, is my impression. In fact, most of the interesting problems logistics seem to reduce to NP-complete problems, which has some unfortunate consequences for finding optimal solutions.
- gizmo686 13y agoThe generalized form of most logistics problems reduce to NP-complete, but we are also almost always working in a system with much more structure than the general problem, so a polynomial time solution may be available. Also, many NP-complete problems can find 'near' optimal solutions in polynomial time. For example, consider the traveling salesman problem in a metric space. We can construct a minimum spanning tree in polynomial time, and we know that traversing this tree takes no more than twice as long as traversing an optimal solution to the traveling salesman problem. By using the triangle inequality, we can further optimize our solution, still in polynomial time.
- saalweachter 13y agoThere is also a bit of a self-reinforcing system in play. Good access to mass transit makes an area more desirable and more expensive, so rich people end up living there. Bad access to mass transit makes an area less desirable and less expensive, so poor people end up living there. But then there is less incentive to expand service into those areas, because it's just a bunch of poor people...