I've seen this happen, but it works better w/ human psychology if the buses are frequent (and people know they are frequent). If it's a bus with a typical headw

I've seen this happen, but it works better w/ human psychology if the buses are frequent (and people know they are frequent). If it's a bus with a typical headway of 5-10 minutes then it's generally ok; if buses only come 2-3 times per hour, being skipped to improve the spacing of buses is really annoying/inconvenient since passengers aren't confident of another bus coming soon. An alternative sometimes used in systems that have infrequent buses is to schedule the route with some slack in the schedule, so the bus is almost always "ahead of schedule". Then it waits at certain designated timepoints until the scheduled time, which re-syncs it with the schedule. This slows down the route overall (since the bus is periodically just sitting at a timepoint for a few minutes), but improves its predictability / adherence to the published schedule. I think I first ran across this in Miami.