Winburg Mini Case Study
To reduce traffic congestion in downtown Winburg, Indiana, the mayor convinces the city to
set up a public transportation system. Bus-only lanes are to be established, and commuters
will be encouraged to “park and ride”; that is, to park their cars in suburban parking lots and
then take buses from there to work and back at cost of one dollar per ride. Each bus is to
have a fare machine that accepts only one dollar bills. Passengers insert a bill into the slots
as they enter the bus. Sensors inside the fare machine scan the bill, and the software in the
machine uses an image recognition algorithm to decide whether the passenger has indeed
inserted a valid dollar bill into the slot. It is important that the fare machine be accurate
because, once the news gets out that any piece of paper will do the trick, fare income will
plummet to effectively zero. Conversely, if the machine regularly rejects valid dollar bills,
passengers will be reluctant to use the buses. In addition, the fare machine must be rapid.
Passengers will be equally reluctant to use the buses if the machine spends 15 seconds
coming to a decision regarding the validity of a dollar bill –it would take even a relatively
small number of passengers many minutes to board a bus. Therefore, the requirements for
the fare machine software include an average response time of less than 1 second, and an
average accuracy of at least 98 percent.