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> There is also a sophisticated infrastructure behind them, e.g. a control room that tells drivers to turn around and go back mid-rout if the buses are too une
by fennecfoxen 10y ago
> There is also a sophisticated infrastructure behind them, e.g. a control room that tells drivers to turn around and go back mid-rout if the buses are too unevenly distributed.
Yeah, it's really sophisticated; it means that if I catch a 3 bus signed for Crystal Palace there's about a 33% chance that it dumps me in Brixton to wait an extra twenty minutes in the rain, instead of taking me all the way home.
- matt4077 10y agoI'm pretty sure the described tactics should succeed at optimising expected travel time, but they (knowingly) do so at the cost of variability. I regular get to experience the opposite: waiting 20min in the rain, at which point three busses arrive as a group. Yet another extreme is low variability with high scheduled travel time, achieved by including a minute of slack at every second stop or so. It's a result of an inherent instability in bus operations: As soon as the intervals diverge only marginally, faster busses become even faster, because there are fewer people waiting for them and vice versa.