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

This is part of a good route design - most bus stops should be "mandatory" - which means the bus stops there no matter what. Some bus stops are "optional" - driver only stops there if there's somebody waiting or if somebody in the bus presses the "STOP" button near the doors. It's marked on the timetable which bus stop is optional.

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.

OTOH, it's extremely annoying to sit on a stopped bus when no one is boarding or leaving. That discourages use of mass transit.

For express or intercity busses, that makes sense, but for high-frequency regular bus routes, I can't imagine that working. It means thar bus stops would have to be extremely sparse, or else the bus trips would need to be extremely slow.

Exactly the opposite. It sucks for intercity buses, cause there's no point. Bus stops are rare and buses don't "bunch up". It's essential for city buses.

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.

You can do a study of the actual number of people who get on/off at each stop and then determine which ones should be optional. And at off-peak hours, almost all the stops are optional at least from what I've seen in Chicago.

City buses stop much more often than every 5 minutes in my experience. It's more like every couple of blocks, sometimes every block, at least in the densely populated areas.

For intercity busses, keeping an accurate schedule is essential. If you miss your bus because it ran ahead of schedule, it's not a five-minute wait for the next one; you'll possibly even be booking a hotel for the night.

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!

>bus stops would have to be extremely sparse, or else the bus trips would need to be extremely slow.

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-...

> And at off-peak hours, almost all the stops are optional at least from what I've seen in Chicago.

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?

My city has actually recently switched to making all stops optional, claiming that it improves efficiency. Let’s see how that will go.

It takes like 10 seconds. And you have to keep the schedule anyway - if you skip this bus stop you'll be waiting at the next one longer.

From my experience in NY, where most stops are optional unless someone needs to get on/off, the schedule means very little. If the schedule says the busses come at 15 minute intervals, all you can assume is that the bus might hopefully come sometime within the next 15 minutes. There tend to be stops roughly every block, so having all stops be mandatory would make walking competitive with taking the bus.

Same in Sydney Australia,

> 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.

That is way too often, it makes service too slow. People have things todo and sitting on the bus is not one oi them (even if they are doing something it is rarely what they want todo.

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

It does if nobody rides the bus you can move faster but somehow you need to ensure the faster but doesn't attract so many riders that you are stopping too often. that generally means watching this and if you get close doingisomething different.

I agree, but a five minute drive is about a 30 minute walk (for an able-bodied person), which is way too far between bus stops for a non-express bus. Especially if you have to catch a connecting bus going along one of the major streets your bus skipped by.

This is how it works around me in Detroit. I know the intervals for different routes and for 15min or less it's not a huge deal to wait. There is a major route that runs only once an hour so I will look up the exact schedule or the live bus tracker for that one. The only mandatory stops are the stations on the ends of the lines / bus turn around points / major transit hubs like the train station or the Greyhound/etc terminal.

I often walk from the place I live at one end of the city here in Lublin to the artificial lake at the other end of the city and I drive a bus back. It goes through the city center.

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.

Yeah, I checked the routes I take and it's 40 minutes for 25 bus stops so about 1.5 minutes between stops.

NYC is a big, dense city, it already takes forever to get around via public transport. If busses were about as fast as walking, people would just use cars.

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.

But you have to search for a parking space and walk from the parking space to the actual destination anyway. Which is like another 10 minutes on top of everything. So buses win over cars in the city center (as long as you can plan to the exact minute so you don't waste time waiting at the bus stops).