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.

This phenomenon consistently happened to my college bus system, but on an even worse scale. The main bus line did a loop around campus, which took ~20 min to complete and buses scheduled every 5 minutes. In reality, you got a caravan of 4 busses arriving every 20 minutes, with the first one totally full and the last practically empty.

This phenomenon is called "bus bunching". My friends, two profs from Georgia Tech and UChicago, came up with one solution for it. They wrote a paper about their solution[1], and then built a startup that has successfully implemented it at a bunch of places[2].

[1]: [A self-coördinating bus route to resist bus bunching](https://doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.trb.2011.11.001)

[2]: [NAU’s new bus system makes for shorter wait times for riders](https://news.nau.edu/nau-bus-schedules/)

That's interesting.

Looking at the second link, it seems they implement it by having the buses pause at certain points. Does it do that with riders onboard? That seems like it could be a deterioration in experience for those riders that are on the bus pausing.