My kids' schools (1 elementary, 1 middle) started last Wednesday. The school system had been having a bus driver shortage, so they hired a "smart analytics" company to use AI to reorganize the start times for all schools and optimize the bus routes so they could theoretically get the same number of kids to and from school with fewer drivers and shorter routes (so the same driver could do more schools as they staggered the start times).
Yeah, that was a major cluster. The last kids got dropped off a 9:58 pm on Wednesday night after being on the bus (or waiting at a transfer depot) for over 5 hours. Some parents called the cops because they thought their kids were missing (took the cops 3+ hours to find one kindergartener wandering around unattended in the wrong neighborhood).
It was so bad that they cancelled school until next Wednesday in the hopes that giving the drivers more time to practice their routes (as if that would fix incorrectly modeling for rush hour traffic and routing drivers the wrong way down one way streets and into alleys that have dead ends rather than going to the expected cross streets - I mean, they can figure out some route changes to fix the one-way business, but it'll make them longer and won't fix the overall tightness that requires everything to run perfectly on time with no delays or the whole system collapses). Of course no parents that I know of planned for (or has access to) child care for a whole week after school was supposed to start (in a district with 96,000 kids), so my kids have been hanging out between my and my wife's office every day. That's been fun.
How's everyone else's summer been going?
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Bikes: 1996 Eddy Merckx Titanium EX, 1989/90 Colnago Super(issimo?) Piu(?), 1990 Concorde Aquila(hit by car while riding), others in build queue "when I get the time"