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

There's another thing that happens with busses that makes it worse.

The further behind the previous bus a bus is, the more people will arrive at the bus stop. The more people there are at the stop, the longer the bus has to spend picking them all up and selling them tickets etc. Therefore the delayed bus will tend to experience more delay. The bus behind them will have less people to pick up, so it will spend a shorter time at stops and tend to catch up with the first bus, so the two busses are dragged towards each other.

That bus with more riders on board also has a higher probability of needing to stop to let people off at each location as well, slowing it down even further!

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.

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