Show HN: Londoners need not worry about the waiting time paradox | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Londoners need not worry about the waiting time paradox

michalpaszkiewicz.co.uk

12 pointssimplesleeper10 comments

London seems to have rediculously small distance between bus stops. This feels like it makes journeys take ages. Is this my imagination or does London have particularly close stops, and is there a good reason for this?

It does indeed have much shorter distances between stops than I've seen elsewhere in europe. The stops are however all optional - if noone flags the bus down and a passenger doesn't press a stop button, the bus won't stop. The buses are pretty frequent, but the amount of bus stops probably means that journey times are sacrificed for the convenience of quick and easy boarding

I don't believe this to be the case in Outer London, at least it's no different to smaller towns in the UK I've visited.

In Central and parts of Inner London it may be the case, however I tend to think buses are primarily designed as vehicles to get people to and from the tube/train network there.

It certainly depends where, some parts of Outer London can be "Hail and Ride" sections, where any part of the street essentially counts as a station

The average distance to the next public transport station in Switzerland is 360 metres. In cities it can drop below 200 metres. Yet the average delay/tardiness/late arrival is 16 seconds.

Why is the conclusion that the operator is padding its schedule instead of simply that the busses run on time? I understand that in the real world the former seems more likely, but I don’t see how that conclusion is supported by the data presented. (Caveat lector: my prob & stats is weaker than it should be; there’s a good chance I’m missing something obvious.)

The schedule is not necessarily padded. The point of the piece is making it clear that London bus timetables are not in any way a source of truth, but a contract that operators have to work towards achieving. It is doubtless that they would have some input into what times are accepted as the contract and would only accept one they think they could manage to operate - so greater times than would generally be achievable.

As a londoner, if you wanted a timetable more based on truth, it would look more like the attached graphic on the page - an analysis of the spread of waiting times.

Author here, you can AMA

Have you read showhn rules?

Yes - this page is not just a blog post. It contains a graphic that is a "timetable of truth" for London buses 1-50, so can certainly be tried out.

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