How well do London buses match the timetables?
michalpaszkiewicz.co.uk
michalpaszkiewicz.co.uk
You lose this ability to check timings with a non-fixed timings, and have to rely on 'oh, it's probably about half an hour from here to here' or google's guess at the real timetabled journey you'll do (which the operator hasn't really promised you at any stage.) People don't seem to mind this too much.
I wonder if part of this is that waiting for a bus is usually less pleasant than being on one in countries where there is often cold/windy/rainy weather. That's something you don't really get with long-distance trains or planes. I'm going to be grumpy if I have to wait in the pouring rain for 15 minutes, even if I still make it to my appointment on time.
[0] Usually defined as being less than 5 minutes late or so.
I use a flight that’s regularly delayed by half an hour but still gets there half an hour early. Whatever - I make my connection every time.
I've seen the gate agents paying scrupulous attention to that, to ensure they don't close the gate early if any pax who have checked in haven't boarded.
Likewise I don't mind wasting time in an airport when I have a company per diem to pay for my drinks, but if it's on my own dime I'd rather not spend any longer than necessary sitting around in uncomfortable airport seats.
I picked this route (between two major London stations) because there are several routes that use two tube lines. Next to the estimated time there's a faint yellow wifi-like symbol. If you click on any one of the options there's a yellow background section with the time to next three trains. The timings are based on both the timetable and the reality of a turn up and go service.
Years ago I was involved with a project to build dynamic displays to show bus times (mostly for third parties like e.g hospitals that wanted to display bus times as a service, but they're in use on some bus stations like Vauxhall and East Croydon as well).
TFL did tons of testing to ensure we complied with requirements to ensure the display would remove time estimates if it could not reach the API often enough, etc. to ensure we never misled passengers.
They were very adamant that the displays always had to under-promise based on what information was available.
Something that the article missed is that late buses are compounded. As the delay causes more people to wait, those people getting on delay the bus even further, that's where the adage "wait ages for a bus, then two come at once" stems from. Even if the bus behind it is also delayed, it makes up time as the previous bus has scoped up all passengers. Occationally buses will divert/ terminate to rebalance the timetable.
I was recently in hospital, where the wifi wasn't great so I spent a lot of time looking out the window, and onto a busy junction. During the later part of rush hour buses often arrived together, even saw three of the same bus arrived together (only a couple vehicles separating the last bus) at one point! (like I said, bad wifi) It was staggering seeing so many ambulances arrive during the weekend, they often arrive together as the first ambulance clears a path (like in Die Hard 3).
You also see that on the tube, when people are fighting to get on a train (delaying it further) then the one following a couple of minutes behind is largely empty, it's even a little more pronounced as trains can't leapfrog each other to spread the load.
Again the statement on the box is not a statement of reality, but a contract that the buyer should be (almost) guaranteed of getting at least 1000 nails.
If I recall correctly, calorie values on nutrition boxes are the same, at least in the US: a 100 calorie snack bag will have at least 100 calories, because the FDA mandates that the seller should be at minimum providing what it claims.
Check out our new BigMac Zero. At least zero calories.
As for the "minimum calories," I've searched and either I'm out of date or was never correct: it seems like the FDA used to have a "80/120 rule": "beneficial nutrients" (vitamin, mineral, protein, total carbohydrate, etc.) must be at least 80% of the label value and "nutrients to limit" (calories, sugars, fats, etc.) must no greater than 120% of the label value. So calories could theoretically be lower than advertised, but not significantly higher.
The FDA seems to no longer have this rule, but calories is still on the "nutrients to limit" side, so the FDA would be mandating maximums, not minimums. My mistake.
I don't recall ever seeing Tic Tacs actually claim "sugar free," though. "Zero grams" is allowed and most people read it the same way, while "sugar free" actually has some more requirements to be able to use.
Ps I thought the US used imperial measures, why are grams getting used?
In the UK if you buy a 'pint' of milk it will still be labelled 0.568 litres.
Presumably there are some rules in the US also, or labels could just use some obscure measures that hide what a product contains.
Labeling definitely isn't always imperial in the US, and it isn't always metric in many European countries. Regulations tend to do a good job of avoiding units that are obscure in that they're rarely used for the specific purpose in question or would have clumsy numbers like the pint to liters conversion you noted.
e.g. A common PET bottle size in the US and elsewhere is 0.5L, which in the US is labeled as "0.5L"/"500mL" usually along with the, in my opinion, somewhat pointless "16.9 fl oz". Meanwhile, a 2L PET bottle is also common in the US and is labeled (and known by virtually everyone) as "2L".
I hope that you mean it's labeled as 0.5L or 500mL and not both of them with a slash.
This is actually not a good analogy. These days nails are mass produced and quality controls are good to ensure each has the same rough shape and weight +/- by a few percentage points. And to ensure a quantity for a box is actually ensuring the weight - much easier to control.
e.g. https://support.discmakers.com/hc/en-us/articles/209954927-M...
Ah, here it's on Wikipedia:
"In the United Kingdom when selling certain goods, bakers were obliged to sell goods by the dozen at a specific weight or quality (or a specific average weight). During this time, bakers who sold a dozen units that failed to meet this requirement could be penalized with a fine. Therefore to avoid risking this penalty, some bakers included an extra unit to be sure the minimum weight was met"
I've also noticed that I dont have to remember timetable because it's basically organized in so-much-trams-per-hour, so it's 20mins or 15, 12 etc. So I just need to remeber a minute-offset and an interval.
As a side effect, i've noticed that at rush hour when interval is 5 mins the timetable stops to have meaning because tram can be within -1 to +3 of timetable arrival, that means it can be virtullay any time. Also, I should wait max abt 5 minutes.
I think that intervals vs arrival time change meaningfullness as a relation of interval vs timetable confidence, and passenger travel time confidence for that matter. If you can't plan your arrival at the stop better than +-1min you don't need exact times for 5-6 minute intervals. For 60min it probably makes sense. I guess one could derive good metrics for this.
If you drive buses or trains you want to know when your service is supposed to start and how long it's supposed to take to get where it's going. But for passengers this is a metro service (except for the first and last services on routes which shut overnight) so they don't care if this is an 1105 running two minutes early or an 1100 running three minutes late.
https://tfl.gov.uk/plan-a-journey/
Timetables are more or less irrelevant at peak times, but if you have connections to make out of peak hours any delays can make a big difference to your day.
For a bus, the intuitive explanation is that if you were viewing a timeline, the biggest parts of the timeline would be the "late" buses, and thus you're more likely to "inspect" (arrive at the bus stop) during one of these longer stretches.
What happened to truth is that there wasn't much clarity to begin with and then the schedulers found out that they could meet expectations by using that ambiguity. Mystery: solved!
Now lets see if they complain about current and electrons going in opposite directions...
It's annoying when you’re on that bus, but it makes sense to try and avoid services bunching together.
(And occasionally when they do end up bunched together, the overcrowded bus in front will wait briefly so the empty bus behind it can pass)
(Obviously they don't tend to do that for hourly busses)
So I'm guessing our public transportation works worse than the one the author describes in Rwanda.
Consider that:
* I'm one of the few people in this city to be in walking distance from a subway station (blame it on archeology)
* Car sharing can be cost effective compared to public transportation: it costs 20-30 cents per minute, so if your trip is 10-15 minutes and you're traveling with another person the car is faster and cheaper.
* The only reason I consider the bus at all compared to the subway is because the stop is literally at my doorstep.
In the backwater I live in now, the situation is situation is supposedly the same, but the busses are much worse about matching the timetable. Be there 3 minutes before the timetable or watch the buss leave ahead of schedule to then spend those minutes waiting at the tow centre before getting under way again.