Needing to account for schedules is a symptom of a bad public transit system. Good systems have buses/trains show up frequently enough that you can just go with

Needing to account for schedules is a symptom of a bad public transit system. Good systems have buses/trains show up frequently enough that you can just go without waiting more than 10 minutes, until the point you're taking regional trips, and even then about ~30 minutes of maximum wait is normal in Germany. Also, it sounds like you're talking about long-distance services here. But this thread is about local to regional services where people don't generally carry around baggage.