5 ms·
Bus Bunching
- righthand 1y agoSouth Brooklyn B35 needs this bad.
- AndrewDucker 1y agoDigital bus timetables at the stop, so that you can see that your bus is running late, or that the next bus is right behind it, definitely make a difference here, because you can make a sensible choice without the driver having to explain to everyone.
- tialaramex 1y agoThe displays are gradually less important because a growing fraction of the population are already carrying a display with wireless networking, on a personal device the UI can show you your exact route and where the bus you need is now etc. 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."
- xandrius 1y agoLet's put even more things on a device which is extremely addictive to many. I love my local region e-ink screens which just show me the info without wasting too much energy.
- AndrewDucker 1y agoThe displays aren't that important for me. But for visitors to the city, who haven't installed the bus tracker app, they're still very useful. (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.)
- tialaramex 1y agoThere shouldn't need to be separate apps. I like Edinburgh, only been there twice and both times as a tourist but I don't think "Wow, a separate Edinburgh bus app" would have been a boon, whereas "Oh, my bus app just works here" would make sense. 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?
- AndrewDucker 1y agoYou can get bus times from Google Maps. But almost nobody seems to know that. A standard "non-profit" bus app that all bus companies could use would probably be very useful.
- tialaramex 1y agoIsn't Google just giving you timetables? 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.
- themulticaster 1y ago
- the_mitsuhiko 1y ago> The displays are gradually less important because a growing fraction of the population are already carrying a display with wireless networking, on a personal device the UI can show you your exact route and where the bus you need is now etc. 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).
- clickety_clack 1y agoI lived in a city with this once, and beyond the novelty factor of the first few weeks after I found the app, I stopped using it. Looking up routes on your daily commute is just too much friction. The display at the station/stop is by far the best indicator, you can see at a glance how long you have to wait when you get to the stop.
- derdi 1y agoMany subway systems have displays showing that the next train is right behind the current one, and yet many people still insist on getting on the current overcrowded one.
- HappyPanacea 1y agoPerhaps they should offer a discount for boarding the next train or a price increase for boarding the overcrowded one or even both?
- bell-cot 1y agoToo difficult to implement - crowds on a busy subway platform are very different from boarding planes at an airport.
- closewith 1y agoWhich makes sense, as the next one may be equally or more overcrowded. In a busy urban area, it may be hours before an uncrowded train arrives.
- derdi 1y agoI'd argue that that's not bunching, it's the entire system being overloaded. A characteristic of bunching is that you have a pair of vehicles which together carry an average manageable load of passengers, but that load is unevenly distributed between them.
- DharmaPolice 1y agoCertainly with buses people have been burned where they are told that another bus will be along in 2 minutes only for that to evaporate and the next bus actually takes 15+ minutes. If that happens to you then you'll squeeze onto the first bus you can physically fit. It takes quite a long period of good service to undo one bad interaction.
- this15testingg 1y agobus only lanes should be standard. One or two people in cars shouldn't be able to delay an entire line, nor should they get priority.
- andreaja 1y agoAnecdotally, I'm pretty sure this phenomenon occurs even with bus lanes.
- AndrewDucker 1y agoIt does. Because junctions still slow them down, as do groups of 30 tourists all getting on at once, asking questions about whether this bus goes to the castle.
- sqrtc 1y agoYou can tell exactly where you live based on the castle reference. Happened to me once when a tourist in front asked about the castle and I couldn’t quite believe it was real.
- redwood 1y agoEdinburgh?
- brainwad 1y ago> junctions still slow them down This is also mostly fixable, with signal priority. Except at complex intersections where different roads each have transit lines fighting for priority.
- xnx 1y ago> One or two people in cars shouldn't be able to delay an entire line 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.
- 1y ago
- anonymous_sorry 1y agoIt isn't half annoying when you're on the London Underground or a bus, and there's an announcement that you will be waiting for a few minutes at a particular stop to "even out gaps in the service". 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.
- federiconafria 1y agoThey could probably spread the wait and no one would notice...
- manbitesdog 1y agoIf the lane is frequent enough, a 2-3 minutes delay is fine. In many European cities the schedule is not specific times but frequencies per time of the day. 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)
- tapland 1y agoThat’s usually how they’re scheduled though, and it’s printed that way to make the timetable shorter and much easier to read.
- anonymous_sorry 1y agoI meant when you're already on the vehicle mid-journey, and you just have to sit at a random stop for a while so you don't catch up to the one in front. 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
- bacontremors 1y ago[dead]
- 1y ago
- lexlambda 1y agoSome of the proposed solutions are problematic. A public transport systems absolutely needs to be reliable for the people who use 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.
- snackbroken 1y agoNo-schedule works fine if (and only if) service is sufficiently frequent, say every 5 minutes. The overwhelming majority of intra-city trips will have 3 transfers or less in a well designed bus network and when planning to catch a less frequent service, it's acceptable to bake in a 15 minute safety margin.
- sokoloff 1y agoIs someone going to regularly take a trip that requires them to take 4 buses? I largely avoid trips that would require even a single bus transfer (admittedly, the Boston bus system is pretty terrible, meaning bus transfers are daunting when contemplating trips).
- Muromec 1y agoYeah, 4 buses sounds terrible. I already don't like it when my trip to that one fancy office is bus-metro-tram instead of just bus/tram and metro. I would totally hate if buses in question were overcrowded, smelling hobos and not having a schedule. Is this the usual European supremacy propaganda? Yes, of course it is.
- baq 1y ago> Skipping stops is the worst 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! ;)
- cjs_ac 1y agoDiscussion on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_bunching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_bunching Discussion of how to solve it in OpenTTD: https://www.openttd.org/news/2024/02/10/unbunching https://www.openttd.org/news/2024/02/10/unbunching
- sebstefan 1y ago>Planners can set minimum and maximum amounts of time to be spent at each stop, and buses might even be told to skip certain stops during crowded runs >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.
- manbitesdog 1y agoIn Spain most city roads with 2+ lanes per direction have a dedicated bus lane, yet you still get bus bunching and spacing adjustments anyways. - 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.
- kevindamm 1y agoexcept that bus A must often go to stops that it would skip, if any of the passengers want to get off there.
- sebstefan 1y agoIf there's bus lanes the bunching happens much more slowly. You fix it by giving slightly more time than needed to the busses for their routes on the schedule, say, 20 seconds per stop. That way if they lost some time on some stops, they fetch it back later. With the inconvenience that all the routes take longer
- whycome 1y agoCould you standardize the dwell time? Hit a max and then maintain regularity
- dmd 1y agoI described this 25 years ago on blush everything2. https://everything2.com/?node=rutgers+bus+system https://everything2.com/?node=rutgers+bus+system
- nix0n 1y agoIn the Boston area, the bus drivers seem particularly likely to react to this by the second bus passing the first (even by crossing a double yellow: traffic laws are generally optional 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.
- gavinsyancey 1y agoThis solves the issue that one bus is way too full. It doesn't do anything to the issue that you've now doubled the headway in front of the late bus.
- crusty 1y agoPassing would only be a temporary solution since the new front bus will now have the delayed position, and the more crowded bus that was passed will have the expedited position and will shortly overtake the front one. They will essentially travel at the same rate and stay bunched in this scenario. 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.
- Lvl999Noob 1y ago1. Frequent service (<5 minutes between buses, ideally) 2. Enough capacity to support rush hours (so each bus can straight up refuse to take extra passengers) 3. Education campaigns and police / fines / other external factor for the short term (to break existing habits) 4. Separate public transport lanes so buses don't get stuck in traffic or behind red lights. 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.
- dang 1y agoRelated. Others? Why Do Buses Bunch? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19558482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19558482 - April 2019 (150 comments) Pittsburgh Bus Bunching (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17589349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17589349 - July 2018 (60 comments) Why do buses bunch? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9577476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9577476 - May 2015 (154 comments)
- plantwallshoe 1y agoThe number one thing that has improved my bus riding experience here in Seattle was them getting all their buses onto a real time tracking app. 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”
- kevin_thibedeau 1y agoIt's really annoying when this happens on the NYC subway. You can be on an express train that has to wait forever for a local train to go first as they try to restore the schedule.
- JohnKemeny 1y agoAlways upvote Futility Closet!