allonlinenovel Chapter 200 A Fleeting Moment
Chapter 200 A Fleeting Moment
Boston Transit Authority, top control room.
On the giant electronic control panel that covers the entire wall, glaring red lines spread wildly across the screen like bulging blood vessels in a terminally ill patient.
The central artery is completely paralyzed!
Storr Avenue is completely blocked!
The Massachusetts Avenue overpass has been completely transformed into a giant steel parking lot!
As far as the eye could see, not a single section of road was spared.
Deputy Director Allen held his chin tightly in his hand, his eyes bloodshot, staring intently at the screen as if trying to bore a hole through it with his gaze.
"Damn it, the metrics have crashed again."
Jamie, the chief analyst standing to the side, swallowed hard, his face showing reluctance as he spoke, his voice even carrying a slight tremor of disbelief.
"This is totally illogical! The morning rush hour has been over for two hours already."
The average congestion index remains stubbornly stuck at 78! What's going on?!
Allen didn't speak, he just shook his head wearily.
The reasons? There are countless.
That irregularly extending, medieval-style, garbage-like city structure...
The "pedestrian priority" signal concept that those idiots in the city council insisted on implementing...
The batch of cheap sensors purchased by the city hall were so slow to respond, as if they suffered from dementia.
And then there are the daily, unpredictable, dramatic unexpected events like chain-reaction collisions and tire blowouts that seem to appear out of nowhere...
As a man standing at the pinnacle of transportation engineering on this planet, Allen's mind contains the blueprints for every single capillary of this city.
Even after exhausting all his academic knowledge and considering all the extreme variables mentioned above, he still felt a suffocating sense of powerlessness at this moment.
"Probably..." Allen gave a self-deprecating twitch of his lips, "because I'm too incompetent."
Jamie was taken aback and looked up abruptly, staring incredulously at his boss.
"Please don't joke like that! Since you took office, the city's traffic has undergone a complete transformation! Everyone can see that!"
Jamie's words were not flattery, but the absolute truth.
The man sitting in front of him, resting his chin on his hand, is named Alan Smith.
A transportation systems engineer from MIT, a true industry leader.
While others were struggling to avoid failing their final exams and practically begging their teachers for help, he earned the respect of the entire academic community during his graduate studies with a paper titled "Analysis of Human Motion Patterns Based on Mathematical Models"!
Later, he went even further and published a paper titled "Optimization Algorithm for Dynamic Signals in Irregular Cities," which earned him a doctoral degree and solidified his unshakeable academic dominance.
For the next ten years, he worked at the Urban Planning Lab at MIT.
Behind the world-renowned smart transportation projects in Singapore, Amsterdam, and Tokyo, stands the shadow of this man.
The papers Allen wrote back then not only received extremely high praise from the academic community;
It has been solemnly included in the core database by the U.S. Transportation Research Council and is directly regarded as the "bible" of related fields by countries around the world!
For a while, major IT giants in Silicon Valley and megacities around the world were fighting tooth and nail to poach him, offering him exorbitant annual salaries.
But what was the result? Allen coldly threw all the invitations into the trash.
When faced with a barrage of questions from the media, Allen only uttered a statement that was both extremely understated and incredibly arrogant:
"I'm sorry, I have absolutely no interest in solving equations that have already been solved."
The translation is: I'm not going to deal with a mess that's too simple.
That's why he didn't even want the gold-plated chair of the chief engineer of the New York City Department of Transportation, and instead went to this godforsaken place, Boston, to suffer.
Because Boston was at the time like a headless fly, trying to push forward a new project aimed at completely redesigning the traffic light system.
In the eyes of Boston politicians, Allen was not only the best candidate, but also their only savior!
"Change? Perhaps there has been a tiny bit of change."
Allen's gaze was somewhat unfocused, as if he were lost in a glorious memory filled with the smell of gasoline.
The fire he started when he first took office certainly burned brightly.
From the outset, he used an extremely ruthless approach, like thunder, to reshape the city's underlying transportation infrastructure.
The city’s bloated sensor database was forced to adopt strict, uniform standards.
The signal logs from each intersection, which were previously operating independently, were taken over and forcibly integrated in real time.
The impressive "Boston Smart Transportation Network," which he personally designed and led the construction of, once reduced the average travel time in the city center by 13%!
Those were truly glorious years.
But that was ultimately just a fleeting moment in the past.
Allen looked up at the large screen in despair, which was now covered again with dense, extremely glaring red lines.
The city has become smarter, but it has also become more challenging.
If a hospital is built on any street corner, or even a tiny construction site is added, the entire system will immediately experience a chain reaction of overload, like a series of thunderclaps.
It's as if the city has developed its own consciousness and is desperately resisting the control of this "outsider," yearning to return to its original chaotic rhythm.
Ultimately, under pressure from countless complaints and politicians, the municipal government compromised and had to humiliatingly revert to the old, albeit foolish, system that wouldn't immediately explode.
"Could it be that your ideals are too high, Deputy Director?"
Jamie looked at Allen's profile, carefully choosing his words.
"I think it's already a miracle that Boston has been able to maintain its current state."
Allen didn't respond, but instead glanced at him sideways and coldly posed a question:
"Jamie, how long have you been working here?"
"A little over fifteen years."
"Fifteen years...that's long enough." Allen sighed.
"The Transportation Bureau is an old and corrupt bureaucratic institution that is rotten to the core."
Everyone who's just coasting along here probably thinks the same way you are right now: "Achieving this much is already pretty good."
Allen's voice wasn't loud, but every word was piercing.
"You're comfortably huddled in your air-conditioned rooms, sipping your coffee with a clear conscience, looking at these supposedly 'acceptable' statistics..."
Yet they remained blind to the heart-wrenching screams of agony emanating from the entire city outside their windows!