Quote Originally Posted by Junjie View Post
Jarrett Walker has a good talk he gives on transit projections... they're total BS. The entire exercise involves taking a model with arbitrary parameters, making arbitrary assumptions about how people will behave, and then spitting out a number. Garbage in, garbage out. Focusing on projections is a waste of time. What's important is whether the service is useful and whether people are using it.
Junjie... shhh... people aren't supposed to know that.

The reason we make the idiotic, mostly-blind guesses is that Uncle Sugar requires that we do so when we come to feed at the money trough. Otherwise, you're right, it's stupid and pointless. Predicting the future in the best of circumstances is a wild crap-shoot; watch channel 4 news any evening, check out what they say the weather is going to be eight days from now, and then in eight days make a note of the actual weather. Do this often enough and you'll see you could do just about as well by randomly guessing. And weather forecasting is about the most scientifically-grounded form of predicting the future that we have.