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

This seems easily fixable for buses, since they can overtake each other. Once the empty bus is in front, it is the one arriving first to pick passengers, while the full bus empties.

In practice I see buses slowing down or stopping to keep their ordering, and I don't understand why.

(Of course that doesn't work for trains which can't overtake)

What do they call it with packets, "quality of service"? FIFO.

It's a good plan but you have to make sure fairness is ensured. It's the same feeling as, if I go get a burger & fries, the guy behind me orders identically, burger and fries, and somehow gets served first. The instinct is to say, "what the heck, why does HE get fast service than me in a straightforwardly unfair manner?!?"

So you'd need the empty bus and full bus to hit the same spot at the same time, fill the empty bus as the full one unloads. But which bus leaves first? If the former empty bus leaves first, you're being unfair QoS to the people who are seated on the full bus (which, to their perspective, at their prior stop, was the first-in-order-on bus so therefore should be the first-in-order-off bus. On the other hand, if the full bus leaves first, why did you make incoming passengers board the empty one? They should have boarded the full one to get to their destination faster.

The solution, which we see in practice, is to have the empty bus wait 5 or 10 minutes and let the full one get ahead. If we are seeing rounded fairness to all parties as the priority.

This makes no sense to me at all. The bus leaves when it is done unloading and loading. There is no question of fairness here, it is not like someone made the fries you were waiting for and gave them to the wrong person.

In a network metaphor, you do not halt all other TCP connection on a system because one TCP connection was stalled by a lost packet, in the name of fairness. No one would ever want that.

The people on the full bus can easily see that they are not moving because they are still unloading. Who would see another empty bus passing by and thinking "those people should be made to wait"?

In my experience on the subway, a train will start SKIPPING STATIONS when they are bunched together, forcing me to get off and wait for another train entirely. So I don't think fairness is the reasons buses keep their order.