Digital bus timetables at the stop, so that you can see that your bus is running late, or that the next bus is right behind it, definitely make a difference here, because you can make a sensible choice without the driver having to explain to everyone.
And the easiest solution to reduce the use of cars?
WFH. Every company implementing a RTO politic should be declined next time they try to get certified for some green-washing label. Especially when some government grants are tied to those certifications.
It isn't half annoying when you're on the London Underground or a bus, and there's an announcement that you will be waiting for a few minutes at a particular stop to "even out gaps in the service".
It seems so perverse to artificially delay a load of passengers because others are running late. But at a system level it probably makes sense.
That's how global optimisation works. Generally speaking you will always miss out on a bunch of local optima when you go for a global optimum. This was well understood by designers in metro systems like the London Underground[0] and road signs.
When each individual strives for the best result for themselves (a local optimum) we often end up in a worse result for everyone (see tragedy of the commons, prisoners' dilemma etc).
Where I live they say it’s “so everyone can make the bus in time” and it’s always made sense to me. Running to arrive at a bus stop just in time, only to find it passed two minutes ahead of schedule, is way worse
Some of the proposed solutions are problematic. A public transport systems absolutely needs to be reliable for the people who use it.
Skipping stops is the worst in that regard and breaks the whole point.
No schedule causes issues downstream, since now there won't be a schedule to depend on when needing to switch to trains or other busses.
But in general, the only thing to realistically improve without decreasing reliability is the amount of time spent at a stop (also mentioned in the article).
All in all, I see these suggestions as "what to do in a worst-case scenario", i.e. if the service already has major issues.
This is one of the things I find infuriating about the Subway in NYC.
There are local trains and express trains. Often, you'll have to wait on the platform for an extra ~10 minutes for a local (v.s. getting on the first available express).
Then partway through the journey, they'll declare that the local needs to go express to make up time. You'll be kicked off and told to wait for the next train.
To make matters worse, the next train is usually in the same predicament, so you end up waiting indefinitely (or giving up and finding another way home).
Here in Graz, Austria, if nobody wants to get off at a bus stop and nobody is there waiting for the bus, it continues right on to the next stop. It all seems to work, somehow.
If the expectation is that the bus will stop at every bus stop in its path.
Vs. a larger system can easily have "commuter", "direct", "express", "park-n-ride", and other busses, with different expectations.
Plus the trivial case - the bus will roll past a stop which has 0 people waiting for a bus, if no current passenger has pulled the "Getting Off at Next Stop" signal cord.
>Planners can set minimum and maximum amounts of time to be spent at each stop, and buses might even be told to skip certain stops during crowded runs
>Passengers might be encouraged to wait for a following bus, with the inducement that it’s less crowded.
>Northern Arizona University improved its service by abandoning the idea of a schedule altogether and delaying buses at certain stops in order to maintain even spacing.
FYI the real solution is bus lanes so busses don't get stuck in traffic. But for that, you need to make space that isn't for cars. So you won't get it in Arizona.
> FYI the real solution is bus lanes so busses don't get stuck in traffic
The real solution is to stop using transit to move human misery from one place to another. Get everyone an individual car (a self-driving at this point EV, of course) and redesign cities to be human-oriented, not transit-focused.
There is NO mathematical way to make buses robust. They will always be some combination of too slow, too expensive, or too inconvenient for most people.
Buses have low average speed because they need to stop often. And you can't make bus stops more infrequent, because people won't be able to walk from their homes fast enough. And doing complicated systems with local/express buses just wastes time during transit.
Buses can't be frequent, because the average daily load is already just around 15 people per bus. And this is with longer off-peak intervals.
The article literally shows that the problem is crowds of people. After work you have 40 people queuing for bus b at every stop so bus c catches up. traffic congestion would mostly affect both buses.
The article shows no such thing. The crowds of people are not the root cause most of the time - if the buses would come at regular intervals, statistically they would all have the same delay because of passengers. But if a bus is already delayed ("if Bus B is delayed by traffic congestion, it incurs a penalty"), there will be more people waiting, which will slow boarding, which leads to more delays, which leads to even more people waiting at the next station etc. But of course, the cause for the initial delay is not always traffic congestion, it can also be a bus breaking down, a large group (e.g. a school class) boarding the bus etc. So dedicated bus lanes (and other measures such as buses/trams being able to influence traffic lights) can't completely eliminate bunching.
In the Boston area, the bus drivers seem particularly likely to react to this by the second bus passing the first (even by crossing a double yellow: traffic laws are generally optional here).
In the article this is presented as a symptom of how bad the bunching is, but as a rider it feels like this helps the problem: new riders are now getting on the bus that's less full.
Passing would only be a temporary solution since the new front bus will now have the delayed position, and the more crowded bus that was passed will have the expedited position and will shortly overtake the front one. They will essentially travel at the same rate and stay bunched in this scenario.
It might make more sense, when the delay to the front bus gets to within a given time of the rear bus' expected arrival time (maybe 1 minute, maybe more, maybe less), the lead bus simply switches to a state where it only picks up when a stop is requested by a passenger until it gets to within some time differential from its scheduled arrival time.
That would suck for some people to watch it pass but realistically, if it wasn't skipping stops, the wait for leap-frogging platoon would be closer to that off the rear bus anyway.
1. Frequent service (<5 minutes between buses, ideally)
2. Enough capacity to support rush hours (so each bus can straight up refuse to take extra passengers)
3. Education campaigns and police / fines / other external factor for the short term (to break existing habits)
4. Separate public transport lanes so buses don't get stuck in traffic or behind red lights.
IMO, these are sufficient for a good public transport system. Skipping stops is the worst since it makes the whole network unreliable.
If the above points are too high of an investment and skipping stops is the only viable solution then a proper digital interface is needed. If the schedule is dynamic then the information about it also needs to be dynamic. I need to be able to know that the bus I am on is going to skip my stop and plan my next steps while I am sitting in the bus itself.
The number one thing that has improved my bus riding experience here in Seattle was them getting all their buses onto a real time tracking app.
I usually have a couple different bus route options, and now instead of just waiting blindly at a bus stop I can actually see which bus is going to be getting to me the soonest and go to that stop instead.
I ride the bus 4 to 5 times a week and pretty much never use the actual “schedule”
It's really annoying when this happens on the NYC subway. You can be on an express train that has to wait forever for a local train to go first as they try to restore the schedule.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 60.7 ms ] threadWFH. Every company implementing a RTO politic should be declined next time they try to get certified for some green-washing label. Especially when some government grants are tied to those certifications.
It seems so perverse to artificially delay a load of passengers because others are running late. But at a system level it probably makes sense.
When each individual strives for the best result for themselves (a local optimum) we often end up in a worse result for everyone (see tragedy of the commons, prisoners' dilemma etc).
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IrHRQSm6LIs
Skipping stops is the worst in that regard and breaks the whole point. No schedule causes issues downstream, since now there won't be a schedule to depend on when needing to switch to trains or other busses.
But in general, the only thing to realistically improve without decreasing reliability is the amount of time spent at a stop (also mentioned in the article).
All in all, I see these suggestions as "what to do in a worst-case scenario", i.e. if the service already has major issues.
There are local trains and express trains. Often, you'll have to wait on the platform for an extra ~10 minutes for a local (v.s. getting on the first available express).
Then partway through the journey, they'll declare that the local needs to go express to make up time. You'll be kicked off and told to wait for the next train.
To make matters worse, the next train is usually in the same predicament, so you end up waiting indefinitely (or giving up and finding another way home).
If the expectation is that the bus will stop at every bus stop in its path.
Vs. a larger system can easily have "commuter", "direct", "express", "park-n-ride", and other busses, with different expectations.
Plus the trivial case - the bus will roll past a stop which has 0 people waiting for a bus, if no current passenger has pulled the "Getting Off at Next Stop" signal cord.
Discussion of how to solve it in OpenTTD: https://www.openttd.org/news/2024/02/10/unbunching
>Passengers might be encouraged to wait for a following bus, with the inducement that it’s less crowded.
>Northern Arizona University improved its service by abandoning the idea of a schedule altogether and delaying buses at certain stops in order to maintain even spacing.
FYI the real solution is bus lanes so busses don't get stuck in traffic. But for that, you need to make space that isn't for cars. So you won't get it in Arizona.
This involves smart cards and fast electronic payment methods. Also removing or discouraging cash payments.
It also might involve designing buses and stops to get people on/off buses faster
The real solution is to stop using transit to move human misery from one place to another. Get everyone an individual car (a self-driving at this point EV, of course) and redesign cities to be human-oriented, not transit-focused.
There is NO mathematical way to make buses robust. They will always be some combination of too slow, too expensive, or too inconvenient for most people.
Buses have low average speed because they need to stop often. And you can't make bus stops more infrequent, because people won't be able to walk from their homes fast enough. And doing complicated systems with local/express buses just wastes time during transit.
Buses can't be frequent, because the average daily load is already just around 15 people per bus. And this is with longer off-peak intervals.
Etc.
The article literally shows that the problem is crowds of people. After work you have 40 people queuing for bus b at every stop so bus c catches up. traffic congestion would mostly affect both buses.
https://everything2.com/?node=rutgers+bus+system
In the article this is presented as a symptom of how bad the bunching is, but as a rider it feels like this helps the problem: new riders are now getting on the bus that's less full.
It might make more sense, when the delay to the front bus gets to within a given time of the rear bus' expected arrival time (maybe 1 minute, maybe more, maybe less), the lead bus simply switches to a state where it only picks up when a stop is requested by a passenger until it gets to within some time differential from its scheduled arrival time.
That would suck for some people to watch it pass but realistically, if it wasn't skipping stops, the wait for leap-frogging platoon would be closer to that off the rear bus anyway.
IMO, these are sufficient for a good public transport system. Skipping stops is the worst since it makes the whole network unreliable.
If the above points are too high of an investment and skipping stops is the only viable solution then a proper digital interface is needed. If the schedule is dynamic then the information about it also needs to be dynamic. I need to be able to know that the bus I am on is going to skip my stop and plan my next steps while I am sitting in the bus itself.
Why Do Buses Bunch? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19558482 - April 2019 (150 comments)
Pittsburgh Bus Bunching (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17589349 - July 2018 (60 comments)
Why do buses bunch? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9577476 - May 2015 (154 comments)
I usually have a couple different bus route options, and now instead of just waiting blindly at a bus stop I can actually see which bus is going to be getting to me the soonest and go to that stop instead.
I ride the bus 4 to 5 times a week and pretty much never use the actual “schedule”