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Comment by caymanjim | Hacker News Reader

This is very common in Manhattan. Whenever I saw a full bus, I'd skip it and wait for the next one, because it was almost certainly going to come along within 5 minutes and be pleasantly uncrowded. On a busy route, it's the sensible choice.

On longer-distance commuter routes, where the scheduled times are 30-60 minutes apart, I wouldn't usually take a chance on waiting for the next one, but I even did that on occasion when a bus was particularly-overcrowded.

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It's mostly been fixed in London. They used to be famous for no busses for 20 mins then 3 at once but they are now controlled by a central computer system which knows all the positions via gps and cell data.

It still happens on the tube (one very full train, followed by a couple of emptier ones). Of course it makes a lot less difference when the trains are every minute...

That's fascinating. Are there any writeups on it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBus_(London) is part of it. Also https://www.intelligenttransport.com/transport-articles/688/... http://www.eltis.org/sites/default/files/case-studies/docume...

It's not actually clear if the de-bunching is algorithms or humans:

>Headway information, the time gap between consecutive buses, will be available to a bus driver at all times on a screen so that they can make decisions such as slowing down or speeding up to help maintain a regulated service and stop undesirable ‘bunching’ of buses.

Either way that's a great use of technology. AVLs and annunciators aren't exactly new technology (both exist with SF's Muni, for instance), but the MTA has definitely not used this data to avoid bunching — even in the subway.

Yeah. Sometimes when you get a bus to X it'll stop saying 'this bus terminates here' after about one stop, well short of X. When I asked the driver WTF he said it's the computer system and if they have too many empty busses going down one route they'll reallocate. There's nearly always another bus a couple of minutes behind to take you to X.

I was thinking someone could build quite a lot of the functionality into a free phone app if the drivers were willing to use it.

Sometimes you'll be on a bus and you'll get a message that it has to wait for a short time at a stop (no more than 2 minutes usually), to even out the service. This is when it's getting too close to the bus in front, so it backs off to retain an even distribution of busses.

It probably also helps that they allow people to load at both the front and back of the bus, and they check tickets while the bus is in motion. Buses in the US generally have people load one at a time through the front door and everyone's ticket has to be checked or (even worse) they have to feed dollar bills through the machine. This greatly increases per-person load times, and exacerbates the bunching effect.

If you're at a bad rail stop (like the first one outside of the central part of a city going outbound at rush hour) it's not uncommon to have to wait two or three trains just to be able to board. In a city like Singapore or London it might not be too long since many of their trains are automated (in Singapore they're all automated/driverless) and the busy lines are allocated enough cars to arrive 1 minute apart or less apart.

Even in cities like Chicago where they arrive 3~5 minutes apart at rush hour, you might still be waiting 30 minutes .. like I was yesterday. ... I really prefer finding crap to do in the city or people to hang out with so I can wait out the rush.

I'm not aware of any metro system in the world that has scheduled headways of under a minute. The Moscow Metro was tops for a long time with 95-second headways on some lines at peak (without full automation, mind you), but Paris Metro Line 1 was recently fully automated and can go as low as 85 seconds. Singapore currently has 120 second headways on its busiest line (East/West, which is not automated) and is working on getting that down to 100: https://medium.com/from-the-red-line/36-just-a-number-21011a...

Note that headway is measured between the arrival of trains, meaning the train has to come to a complete stop, let people get on & off, close doors, speed off and have another train stopped all within that period! So a 90-sec headway will feel like less than a minute to users.

Victoria line on the London underground does 100 seconds, with plans for the Northern Line to reach that too FWIW.

Doesn't really help much though. Sometimes you still have to wait 2 or 3 (or more!) trains before you can get to the front of the platform edge so that you can actually get on though!

TPH on Victoria line is now limited by platform constraints I think, you literally can't move passengers through stations like Stockwell any faster because of the size of the passageways.

Same happens in Seattle (and we have some nice services that show you the GPS locations of all the busses on the route, so you can be pretty sure an empty one is right on its way)

That app was built by a UW student and uses estimated data based on the schedule, as far as I know. It's not accurate... unless things have changed in the last year or so since I moved.

It's always been real-time location data. At one point it was pretty low-tech (odometer hooked up to a radio transmitter) but it's now been GPS-based for ~5 years.

Are we talking about OneBusAway?

These days OneBusAway is just one frontend for the data, the Transit app has the same information.

When that app (OneBusAway) first came out, it was extremely accurate. It completely went to crap when Metro took over maintenance.

It's very accurate now. I don't know when your experience with it was.

It pulls from the same source that Google Maps currently does, so feel free to use whichever you prefer.

I last used it about 4 or so years ago, so of course things may have changed. It was appallingly bad though, to the point where it was no more accurate than posted schedules on the routes I rode. I just quit using it because it was so thoroughly useless. The sad thing is that it previously had worked extremely well. Glad to hear they've fixed the issues.

There's something to be said for explicitly commuting the least distance (constrained by affordability) and not when everyone else is:

1. less time wasted -> a. more time to be productive in primary pursuits, b. more leisure time and c. if during business hours, more productivity accomplishing errands

2. less stress

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