AI, as in Ay Caramba!

In Loomis’ absence let me take up the anti-tech bro beat:

The entire city of Louisville was caught off guard when Jefferson County Public Schools officials canceled classes for Thursday and Friday because of a “transportation disaster” that had some elementary students arriving home as late as 10 p.m. At least one JCPS bus driver said the problems experienced on the first day of school are the result of a flawed software program that uses artificial intelligence to generate routes. That will come as no surprise to many parents who were already raising red flags about bus stops and routes in the days before the school year started…

Pollio talked about AlphaRoute on the first day of school before the afternoon and evening bus delays. “It’s a consulting company that has done this is in several other districts,” he said. “They won our RFP when we put out our ‘Request for Proposal’ and obviously we’ve made sure they have a history of being successful in other places as well.” JCPS is not the first district to use AlphaRoute software. WDRB Investigates found AlphaRoute was not successful for Columbus, Ohio City Schools, that states largest school district with over 35,000 students riding the bus.

AlphaRoute is out of Massachusetts and helps with planning routes and assigning bus stop locations. The program — developed by graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — uses artificial intelligence to generate the routes with the intent of reducing the number of routes. Last year, JCPS had 730 routes last year, and that was cut to 600 beginning this year…

One bus driver told WDRB the problem isn’t the new start times. It’s the routes, and many drivers struggled with long, unfamiliar routes they had never before driven. John Stovall, president of Teamsters Local 783, the union that represents bus drivers, said drivers are working Thursday and Friday to practice routes and let the district know what doesn’t work. They can also work Saturday and Sunday, but that’s optional. Stovall said the union relayed its concerns about AlphaRoute to JCPS before school started. Some drivers have already resigned over the situation, including a 14-year veteran with perfect attendance. Stovall said the union believes JCPS should cancel classes next week as well but knows that’s not a popular opinion. 

I find this awfully interesting. In theory, developing a bus route algorithm is something that AI could do well, as there are far too many potential routes for the human mind to be able to construct, grasp, and implement without relying on a series of rules of thumb and best practices that may work fine enough in practice but that don’t necessarily optimize the incredibly difficult problem of getting thousands of kids to over 150 schools in tight time windows. I think Erik would point out that the returns to optimization are fewer jobs and fewer hours for bus drivers, but there are circumstances (massive bus driver shortages happening right now, for example) when school districts need to contemplate that kind of optimization. But at the same time, driving a bus is hard and there are many roads that may look passable to the algorithm but that absolutely cannot be safely traversed by a bus, and stops that cannot be safely occupied by a kid. This is a classic problem of high modernist thinking running up against local knowledge. It’s not a surprise that this ended in disaster, and much blame rests with district transportation officials for insufficiently vetting the routes that were generated.