Bus Bunching
futilitycloset.com
futilitycloset.com
>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.
- Imagine bus A is followed by bus B, it's 5PM and people are leaving work simultaneously
- Bus A spends a lot of time on each stop picking passengers up
- When bus B arrives, fewer people are waiting and it tends to take less time
- Eventually, bus B catches up to bus A so A must skip stops to maintain proper spacing
As for why this doesn't annoy people: if both buses are already close together, any ETA changes from spacing adjustments are minimal, and bus A will show no destination on the front display, so no false expectations are created.
the train that leaves first gets there first
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although, entering a station once with a friend, we ran for an arriving subway train with a friend. they got on but I did not. however, I was familiar with the station we were in, and the destination station and I realized....
so I ran down the platform, continuing in the same direction, and before I reached the other end of the platform, as I expected, the follow-on train arrived. I boarded it, and now I was ahead of my friend schedulewise: blew their mind when I was waiting for them to exit at the destination station.
I understand this is what motivates people, and I also understand that, when asked, they would claim that this is in their rational self-interest. As I also wrote elsewhere, I tend to disagree or at least question this assumption in general. Are you really in that much of a hurry? If you have a very hard deadline, wouldn't it have been in your rational self-interest to leave home five minutes earlier? etc.
Yeah, but in this bunching scenario I prefer taking a train with lots of space than arriving maybe two minutes earlier packed like a sardine. Having screens which also show when the following trains will arrive helps a lot of course...
i ran down the platform and, without any other waiting, climbed on the first car of the next train
they got off the last car of the first train and started to walk in the same direction as the train. while they were walking, the first car of the next train, me, rolled well past them before stopping.
Subway system here has an amazing propensity to send random trains on express tracks, especially during peak traffic. I understand that this is done to alleviate congestion, but the net effect is that when you see a train going somewhere you want, you _seize the opportunity_.
Is your subway system running trains every 1-2 minutes (30-60 trains per hour)? Mine has trains at 5-8 minute spacing at peak times and 8-12 minutes off-peak.
Passengers getting on and off can be a cause, but that is probably a symptom of boarding accessibility issues.
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 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.
Bus lanes are good but it's driven by crowd sizes and a lot of combatting bunching can be done without adding bus lanes
EDIT Who said there's only buses? There are cars, taxies and subway
It's always possible to add more buses or people can just go queue at the previous bigger stop it's 2 min walk away and it always stops there.
The point is that crowds cause bunching. I don't know what is your point
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.
These two things are in direct, violent contradiction. Mass transit is what allows human-oriented city design. Individual traffic requires car-centric, human-hostile design.
What exactly is "human" in dense human anthills with 30-story towers?
> Individual traffic requires car-centric, human-hostile design.
Cars have people inside them. And unlike buses, cars allow people to have much more living space, cars are available at any time of day and night, you don't have to wait for a car for 30 minutes, etc.
Cars are human-friendly! Far more so than ANY other transit mode.
And cities should be built for humans, not for transit and bikes.
Living with and regularly interacting with "people" instead of living in a personal convenience store.
> Cars have people inside them.
Cars kill people. A lot. Like, orders of magnitude more than literally anything other mode of transportation. If you die in a car, it was almost certainly the fault of a driver. If you die walking or cycling, it was almost certainly the fault of a driver. Cars a human-hostile in the most literal sense. Cars kill people. The solution to the problem of cars killing people is not putting more people in cars, because cars are happy to kill people in cars. Because cars kill people.
> And unlike buses, cars allow people to have much more living space
Please elaborate on this. What does "living space" mean to you?
> cars are available at any time of day and night, you don't have to wait for a car for 30 minutes, etc.
Buses only exist because so much money has been spent on car infrastructure, and they are the only mode of public transportation that can directly use that car infrastructure. Once you stop spending insane amounts of money on car infrastructure, more reliable transit can be built (trams, subways, heavy rail, cycling infrastructure, walking infrastructure).
> Cars are human-friendly! Far more so than ANY other transit mode.
Have you - heck, have anyone you know - ever made a friend while driving? Or does human-friendly not include being friendly with humans?
> And cities should be built for humans, not for transit and bikes.
Kachow!
Certainly an interesting question, but completely irrelevant to the discussion. Unless you're really arguing against big cities rather than against mass transit, but that's an entirely different discussion.
> Cars are human-friendly! Far more so than ANY other transit mode.
No. Cars are human-hostile. Far, FAR more so than ANY other transit mode. Foir one thing, they kill FAR more people than any other transit more. But also because they require So. Much. More Space.
Sure, it's nice to have your own private space while moving around (not worth much when you have to concentrate on driving and are thus stressed, but let's assume that will be alleviated by self-driving cars) but you're not alone. There are 100,000 people who also want to move in the same space. And thus everyone gets a big upside once and a downside that is small but multiplied by 99,999.
The result is this: https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2018/02/07/16/48F74A0F000005...
And this: https://lede-admin.usa.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/si...
Now does that look human-friendly to you?
> And cities should be built for humans, not for transit and bikes.
But what you're arguing for is to build them for cars instead. And we have done that and we know the result is horrible. And whe have done the other options too, and we know they are much better.
You don't really need 30 story towers to have mass transit. Row houses with 3 stories and a few apartment complexes here and there is enough density to not spend forewer to get somewhere and also not necessarily need a car.
Urbanists just prefer not to talk about it, it complicates the propaganda. After all, urbanism is supposed to have no downsides. It's like violence: if it's not helping, you're not doing enough of 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.
Is this the usual European supremacy propaganda? Yes, of course it is.
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.
Depends. If the timetable is packed or the buses are already bunched, skipping a stop is actually preferable - unless you want to hop off at that stop, too bad then! ;)
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).
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)
It takes quite a long period of good service to undo one bad interaction.
These could still be smarter, I remember a year or two ago stood at a bus stop, watching the position indicator for a bus I wanted to catch and realising as it in real life appeared at the next junction - it was diverted away from my stop, one of the icons I'd been ignoring was a deviations from normal route, it's often set [road construction work] but that week the diversion avoided the stop I was stood at. That bus goes in long loops so I caught it about a quarter mile away after a breathless run, but a smarter app could say
"Hey, you seem to be waiting for the U6H, at the Broadway stop, and it's not going to that stop. Walk this way for a few minutes to reach a temporary stop at which today's U6H will pick you up instead."
That is not my experience at all. I use busses every day and I always use the posted times and don't want to look for it on my phone. There are a handful of bus stops on my common routes without displays and I always hate it.
I'm not sure there is a critical mass of people actually looking at the apps for real-time departure information, at least not in my city (Vienna Austria).
I love my local region e-ink screens which just show me the info without wasting too much energy.
(Also, signal is terrible throughout lots of central Edinburgh. I can be at a bus stop just off Princes Street and get nothing at all.)
At one point Edinburgh's bus operator was part of the same legal entity as the company which provided some bus services in my city, though that is no longer true. London has it right, no tourists and almost no locals care about the bus companies. All the buses are painted the same colour, all of them work the same way, who cares which company operates the bus or why?
A standard "non-profit" bus app that all bus companies could use would probably be very useful.
That's not useless but it's no substitute for real time information. Seeing "Your bus is six minutes away" is reassuring in a way that "Well, the bus isn't scheduled for another minute, and maybe it's running late" is not.
In that "Oops, it's diverted" case which annoyed me, my bus was, from that point of view, genuinely getting closer, I could see it on the map. And then I realised, with growing horror, that it's on a road which won't pass me. Maybe that's a glitch? Then I saw the bus itself, in the real world, too late it's actually not coming 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.
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.
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.
Like "from 7AM to 11AM, one bus every 8 minutes". Then you have the bus app if you want to optimize further (and if you're me, miss it because of being too tight)
I get why, it just feels like your time is being wasted.
Of course, the trade-off is that next time you'll have a shorter wait to catch a bus or train because some other passengers had to sit and twiddle their thumbs for a bit
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).
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.
This is also mostly fixable, with signal priority. Except at complex intersections where different roads each have transit lines fighting for priority.
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 happens all the time that one or two people on the bus itself (or, even worse, train) delay the whole line. The fundamental problem is inflexible public transit.
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”
Discussion of how to solve it in OpenTTD: https://www.openttd.org/news/2024/02/10/unbunching