The waiting time paradox: why is my bus always late? (2018)

It's not worth it to make every stop optional because then the routes become too unpredictable and scheduling is hard. Usually there's like 5-10% of optional bus stops on each route - only in the places where very few people get in/out.

This is how it works in every big city in Poland, it's working great. More cities started to use this system over time, because it improves the scheduling so much.

The point of city buses is that they drive in traffic anyway - they rarely drive over 50 km/h and they stop every 5 minutes. How regular they are is MUCH more important than how fast they drive.

If you skip 3 stops because nobody waited there - you get to the 4th bus stop 5 minutes too early and wait for 5 minutes there - potentially blocking the bus stop for others and wrecking havoc with the scheduling. Much better to split these 5 minutes between the bus stops where nobody is blocked.

It's like in gamedev - you don't want to optimize happy case cause you're making the situation WORSE. If your fastest frame takes 5 ms instead of 10 ms it changes nothing at best (and makes for more jerky movement at worst). If your longest frame takes 15 ms instead of 18 ms - it means you can keep consistent 60 FPS now - and that's a HUGE win.

For express busses, stops are far enough in between and all major locations, so you may as well stop at all of them.

For milkrun busses, where the frequency is so high, scheduling errors are only really a problem if the busses bunch up and create excessive gaps.

If a bus trip takes 45 minutes when a car takes 15, more people drive and then traffic gets bad. But busses with dedicated lanes and coordinated light-timing can go much faster than traffic, when they aren't stopping for passengers!

I think you and I must live in cities with very differently-run transit companies!

If nobody is waiting and nobody asks to get off they don’t stop. If nobody asks to get off and there’s a second bus right behind, drivers skip the stop.

Way too many transit operators choose extremely slow. Having bus stops every 100m is popular because it offers almost door to door service. But when every single person separately boards it results in the vehicle being stopped 1/3 of its running time! People generally prefer faster bus routes (average 20 MPH) even if it requires them to walk a block to the stop versus a service that stops every block but averages 6 MPH (bicycle speed).

https://humantransit.org/2011/04/basics-walking-distance-to-...

Do you not have schedules at bus stops? If you skip almost all the bus stops you'll be like 10 minute early at the first non-empty bus stop, so you'll have to wait for these 10 minutes there (or you depart early which makes people miss their bus).

Potentially you'll be blocking the bus stop for these 10 minutes for other buses.

Why not split these 10 minutes between the empty bus stops instead?

> the Keoride app matches customers who are travelling in the same direction and calculates an optimised flexible route to pick up and drop off customers close to their destination, you can even track the vehicle and get updated on your ETA in real time.

> If a bus is indicating ( min 5 secs ) and is pulling out from a bus stop they have right of way. Failure to Give Way is worth a $362 fine and [demerit] 3 points.

what is right is a compromise but everx block is too much

It's 12 km on foot one way and probably like 20 km in the bus the other way (it can't drive on the pedestrian/bike path along the river). I walk these 12 km in 2 hours and the bus takes 40 minutes to take me back. There's 25 bus stops on the route I take (and a few more later). There's 2 optional bus stops but they are past the point where I get off the bus.

So that's 1.5 minutes between bus stops (including the stops themselves which take around 5-15 seconds usually).

What's wrong with walking being competetive with buses BTW? The point is that it's better than driving in a car.

There's nothing all that bad about driving a car, so public trasport has to be at least better than walking to be better than driving.

For example, looking at some of the commutes my family does (I work fully remotely), one has to spend 45 minutes to travel ~12km via subway, which would be 20 minutes via car, or 2 hours if walking. Another has to spend 2 hours to travel ~50km via subway and bus (all still within the city) or 30 minutes via car, with the equivalent walk apparently taking 7 hours.

So, in the first case, that's an extra hour and a half they're losing per day to just transport, and in the second case that's 3 hours per day being lost to transport. Now add in time spent taking kids places, and basically you end up spending most of your life outside of work just getting around instead of actually doing stuff.

Seriously, Translink runs on a 28-hour day for bus service. If you want someone to test every single system, especially someone that knows how a system should work vs how it does work vs how it failed on this particular bus, you already have an employee for the job; one that's doing customer service and working around any shortcomings at the same time.

I would not count on bus drivers being replaced by AI any time soon.

The surprising results:

- According to the results of the traffic modelling, the on-demand scenario wasn't substantially more successful in attracting additional passengers than the "classic buses running every 10 minutes" scenario (i.e. in both cases predicted passenger counts increased, but by approximately the same amount). This was because on-demand public transport has quite a bit of time-wise overhead, too: You need to order a vehicle instead of simply showing up at the bus stop, it takes a while for the next vehicle to arrive, due to ride sharing some detours might be incurred compared to a direct route, and the unpredictable journey time variation due to these factors is very disadvantageous when connecting to fixed-route fixed-timetable public transport, such as the remaining three bus routes, or railway services.

- The overhead of operating a large fleet of on-demand vehicles was high enough that even with driverless operation the on-demand scenario was more expensive to operate than the expanded every-ten-minutes bus service with drivers

SF recently acquired 33 new buses for $1.7 million apiece. Throw in maintenance and fuel costs and it’s easy to see that amortizing over a driver making $40/hr plus benefits is just not that big a deal, especially if you’re now adding a suite of sensors, electronics, and computing hardware.