Supervisor Shuffle

[trainman8119]

This new deployment of supervisors makes me giggle. For an organization that constantly whines about fuel costs, they are now going to put more supervisors in suv's and have them go to a corner to sit, no doubt with the engine running, to monitor buses on a computer screen. Then and only then, if there is a problem, will they go to a point, only to find 3 buses together, all full (that is the reason they probably are all together to start with) and won't be able to turn something around. In addition, in the time it would take to have someone empty out a bus and load another, the buses in question could be closer to its ultimate destination and 2 more buses will probably back up and nothing will be accomplished.

For all this new technology, you would think that someone would centralize the monitoring and use the good old 2 way radio to make the moves. Of course, looking at the posts in the bus tracker forum, you could see why that wouldn't work either. A real question of reliablility in this "wonderful" system .

To me, this all shows how the decision makers just don't have a clue in what they are doing...just doing to apparantly justify questionable spending.

[Busjack]

Well, it was clear that the supervisors weren't doing anything useful under the current system.

Some observations I can agree with. The bit about roving supervisors in Escape Hybrids reminded me of page 168 of Lind, Chicago Surface Lines: An Illustrated History: a picture of 23 supervisors in front of 23 radio equipped cars. So, we're back at 1942. I don't see any reason why central control can't take care of it, except unless if the internal version of Bus Tracker is as unreliable as the public version appears to be, as indicated in the BusTracker thread and as you noted.

Also, I don't see the point of unloading one bus, except perhaps to short turn it. I did applaud Huberman for finally mentioning some real time remedies, although I favor the "wait for next bus" sign and go ahead approach.

However, since the Escapes are hybrids, the engines won't be running.