Today being a Tuesday, we started off the day with team updates in our stand-up meeting. It seems like everyone has been busy this past week trying to prepare for our upcoming presentation tomorrow. In light of this, after our big group meeting, my team rehearsed the power point presentation we had put together for the presentation tomorrow. I was hoping this would be just a quick run through, but with everyone being there to give input, we ended up doing a bit more revisions and adding/removing some material as we went, so the whole run through took quite some time. Kristen presented the whole thing in our run through, but now we've decided that her and Frank will split the presentation. Our group can be a bit frustrating at times when it comes to decision making and dividing up tasks because typically everyone is willing to do the task, but no one wants to step on anyone else's toes and so no one ever just says, "Ok, I'm doing this." Anyhow, I was still a little worried that we might go over time in our presentation tomorrow, but we'll practice again tomorrow morning and I'm sure it'll be fine.
The rest of the day I was assigned the task of looking into how much cost savings would be possible if some of the ugly rides were sent to taxis instead. This in theory sounds like a simple one day task, but it ended up being much harder than I anticipated because to get the mileage between latitude and longitude pairs I had to make a separate python script that made osrm requests, which are also very slow. Due to this, I also had to restrict the method I was using to calculate cost and simplify it based on some basic assumptions so that the program would not take so long to run. Surprisingly, the data I was getting back showed that most of the ugly rides would NOT be better off on a taxi, but this can be explained by many factors that go into the way I was doing this very simple first pass at calculating cost differences. For example, I was only comparing to the cost per boarding of the ugly ride, but really an ugly ride effects all other riders who they share the bus with, and if we recalculated what their costs would be instead if we got rid of the ugly ride, then the cost savings might be more dramatic.
The rest of the day I was assigned the task of looking into how much cost savings would be possible if some of the ugly rides were sent to taxis instead. This in theory sounds like a simple one day task, but it ended up being much harder than I anticipated because to get the mileage between latitude and longitude pairs I had to make a separate python script that made osrm requests, which are also very slow. Due to this, I also had to restrict the method I was using to calculate cost and simplify it based on some basic assumptions so that the program would not take so long to run. Surprisingly, the data I was getting back showed that most of the ugly rides would NOT be better off on a taxi, but this can be explained by many factors that go into the way I was doing this very simple first pass at calculating cost differences. For example, I was only comparing to the cost per boarding of the ugly ride, but really an ugly ride effects all other riders who they share the bus with, and if we recalculated what their costs would be instead if we got rid of the ugly ride, then the cost savings might be more dramatic.