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Bringing in someone like Jarrett Walker simply plasters over - temporarily - all these political and structural issues you describe. The transit system will be back in the same place sooner or later, in fact more often than not sooner.

In other words I reject the premise of your question. I don’t think Jarrett Walker or some other consultant really could come in and do a “better” job than the people already present in their service planning units.

A huge amount of consulting is not about doing something “better” it’s about creating an aura of legitimacy and credibility. I don’t think that Jarrett Walker - or anyone for that matter - can drop in to a typical city and learn the details of their transit system in a matter of months.

I don’t have time for whatever this is. Clearly you seem to want to argue with some other hypothetical person not actually in this thread.

That’s a strawman and you know it! I’m saying that actually quantifying a generally applicable benefit to a specific local context is actually a complex process. You can have a range of potential benefits but it’s a generalized range and nothing more. You can’t budget off that.

Like how much DOES two-door operation or stop consolidation save on a specific bus route? Yes there are was to estimate this from peer examples, modeling exercises, etc., but how reliable are these if you are literally writing a schedule that actual people have to use every day?

Nobody is saying that saving runtime would not have some sort of potential operating cost impact. The biggest problem is: 1) quantifying it in relation to actual budgets on the timeframes that service cut discussions usually occur (weeks or perhaps months) 2) quantifying the actual savings on time.

That is especially true if an agency has already tried to reduce OT time - shifts longer than 8 hours. Because then, any run time savings may have functionally zero cost savings if (like most agencies) drivers/operators get paid a flat 8 hours even on shifts shorter than 8 hours.

The typical mechanism that service cuts rely on is usually by cutting driver/operator headcount. Stop consolidation and all door boarding save money at the margins - we’re talking perhaps 10-15% running time reductions. That simply isn’t “same service volume but with fewer drivers” savings.

Ok so what you’re really saying is you wanted to complain about things that annoy you on CTA and Metra that an indeterminate number of other agencies may or may not be doing.

You’re right. Every agency is staring at a huge savings that’s cheap and easy with no consequences and they just choose not to do so because actually the people that schedule buses and trains actually secretly hate buses and trains. Cool cool cool.

Imagine you just had your hours at work cut. Yeah, maybe you could change your ac/furnace to a heat pump etc. to lower your utility bills and balance that out, but what good is the investment if you can’t pay for groceries in the intervening months before those savings start to materialize.

The problem with these Alon Levy “actually if they were SMART they would do x, y, and z” lists is they aren’t, temporally, an option. The budget crisis is right now, and the agency’s budget has to balance right now. You’re talking about spending money to save it later but that’s not an option now.

If you want to put your money where your mouth is, take a job on the payroll of an actual transit agency, spend five or ten years there. Make and live with the tough choices.

If you actually worked for a transit agency, I would accept this reasoning. But you don’t, do you? You’re a consultant. YOU choose your clients. YOU choose to present these supposedly “least bad” options. And you don’t live with the consequences because you can just move on to the next client.

The punchline here is that between SC13 and CitiesXL, there was a genuine fear that the genre was legit dead. The bar for Skylines following on the trainwrecks of both XL and SC13 was incredibly low.

There was also, around the same time as SC13, the even worse dumpster fire that was CitiesXL. That game’s dev team initially hyped it as “this will do everything a fully modded SC4 can do but also full 3D…curved roads!” And then…well…holy crap.

Not just SC13; on the eve of Skylines’ release, the only notable City-builder that had been released since Sim City 4 besides SC13 was…CitiesXL. So the genre had more or less gone an entire decade on “whatever the SC4 modding community can come up with” as the sole updates in the genre.

They (FRA's consultants) literally are leaving all the important questions about regional infrastructure - which is a lot more than just Hunter and CP216 - to "phase 2".

Have to agree with you Alon, the FRA's Service Optimization Study was not really that good and had quite a lot of problems in both its overall design and the methodology. I think they really approached the entire problem backwards and I think your post does a good job pointing that out.