Economists talk about money ... maybe more than others. Operations researchers talk about optimization to save money.
Optimization can be practiced in many places, including in the engineering of traffic using stochastic simulation.
Here is a good example where optimization can save money.
A worker leaves his suburban residence on Friday, August 27, 2021, around 6:50 am to go to work for a shift that starts at 7:00 am. He would be in a hurry to arrive on time.
The suburban residential neighborhood has several short block stop signs. After he passed the fifth or so stop signs, he sees an officer behind him on a flashing motorbike and promptly pulls to the side and stops.
The officer cites the driver at 6:53 am for failing to stop at the fifth or so stop sign. As much as the driver was in a hurry to arrive at work on time, he remembers slowing down to stop at the stop sign but concedes that he may not have come to a complete stop before he started to accelerate. The officer contends that it was a 10 mph drive-through caught by his body camera.
So, rules mean rules and the driver makes no excuses for failing to come to a complete stop before proceeding and that the officer is within his dutiful right to cite the driver for not coming to a complete stop.
Now factor optimization into rules and see how to save money, including taxpayers' money.
What is the probability that a driver in a suburban neighborhood fails to stop at the fifth or so stop sign in that neighborhood after leaving his residence around 6:50 am on a Friday morning and that about 3 minutes later, an officer happened to be near that stop sign and cites a worker in a hurry for a 10 mph drive-through? The stop sign was at two intersecting streets in the suburban neighborhood and the driver remembers no car on either street when he drove through the intersection. The driver is not sure if the officer's body camera shows any car on either street at that time.
It doesn't take a lot of thinking to figure out that the probability of such a happenstance in a suburban neighborhood is very very low. In that low probability comes the optimization of resource allocation in both identifying problems and addressing them optimally.
How much discretion the officer has in addressing the problem optimally once it is identified is not clear. Common sense suggests that if the officer simply said to the driver that he had slowed down but failed to come to a complete stop and he doesn't want to stop the driver again and that he not do it again, it would go as a reinforcement of learning experience, needless to mention that the driver probably wouldn't be late by 1 minute and saves a judge from taking time to review the case and thereby save a little bit of taxpayers money.
Then again, subjective common sense doesn't mean objective rules. Or can common sense be objectified? Or can it evolve into it?
This is a very simple example. However, it is out of such simple examples that operations research professors bring out a lot of savings by exercising resource optimization if public police departments invite them to do so.
BTW, don't robo-texts have a rest in the early morning hours instead of sending ads at 6:19 am about taking off 4 sizes from one's waist in 3 weeks? It takes time to take a glance at it, which could be used to come to a complete stop later on that same morning.