Very nice visualization. Minor suggestion... I would put a [Delay] button on each bus - to avoid the explanation.
It'd also be nice with a capacity slider, the flow of buses will vary differently if they average a lower fill rate.
Why Do Buses Bunch?
21–30 of 153 posts
Re: Why Do Buses Bunch?
#22You should add a button for people to "work remote" if you want 10x karma.
Re: Why Do Buses Bunch?
#23How buses bunch is fairly ovious: the trailing bus has few people to pick up so it moves faster, uselessly catching up to the full bus. Why they bunch up is actually a different reason: the operators don't give a darn about sticking to schedules and/or tracking the other buses and maintaining space.
Out here (vancouver) operators are allowed to skip stops when full, so they are able to recover from this state gracefully.
Depending on the frequency of the bus route I'd prefer adherence to a schedule vs. efforts to minimize bunching. With frequent buses I think the schedule ends up being irrelevant - but if the hourly bus I occasionally take pulls in fifteen minutes early or late then I will be pissed, especially on the early side.
Re: Why Do Buses Bunch?
#24There is one line where I use this to my advantage, I could wait at the bus stop for the next 417, but if I miss it by a short time I know that if I catch the 137 that the 417 will pick up all of the passengers from the stops and so the 137 won't have to stop as many times, and I will usually be able to run from one to the other.
Re: Why Do Buses Bunch?
#25This is very common in Manhattan. Whenever I saw a full bus, I'd skip it and wait for the next one, because it was almost certainly going to come along within 5 minutes and be pleasantly uncrowded. On a busy route, it's the sensible choice. On longer-distance commuter routes, where the scheduled times are 30-60 minutes apart, I wouldn't usually take a chance on waiting for the next one, but I even did that on occasio…
Same happens in Seattle (and we have some nice services that show you the GPS locations of all the busses on the route, so you can be pretty sure an empty one is right on its way)
That app was built by a UW student and uses estimated data based on the schedule, as far as I know. It's not accurate... unless things have changed in the last year or so since I moved.
Re: Why Do Buses Bunch?
#26Would it help to have the trailing bus pass the leading bus when they bunch up?
My reasoning:
(1) As the article said, full buses move slower because more passengers means more boarding/unboarding time at stops.
(2) The lead bus is the fuller, slower one. Slower bus in front means buses get closer together.
(3) If one bus passes the other, then you have the faster bus in front and the slower one behind. They should then get further apart.
At least they should for a time. The now-leading bus is going to scoop up a lot of passengers at the next several stops and the now-trailing bus won't, so the leading bus will eventually slow down. So it's not perfectly self-balancing or anything, but maybe it would get some distance between them. More distance than not doing it.
Re: Why Do Buses Bunch?
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same happens in Seattle (and we have some nice services that show you the GPS locations of all the busses on the route, so you can be pretty sure an empty one is right on its way)
That app was built by a UW student and uses estimated data based on the schedule, as far as I know. It's not accurate... unless things have changed in the last year or so since I moved.
It's always been real-time location data. At one point it was pretty low-tech (odometer hooked up to a radio transmitter) but it's now been GPS-based for ~5 years.
Re: Why Do Buses Bunch?
#28This happens all of the time in Boston, especially with the bigger bus lines. No number 1 bus for 30 minutes, then 3 or 4 of them. Regardless of the cause, it's very frustrating as a passenger from a UX standpoint.
The dreaded 66 lining up one after an other
Re: Why Do Buses Bunch?
#29The layout of the page appears to bunch on mobile Safari on iOS as one long, skinny column for the main text.
Edit: Written on an express bus that doesn't bunch, although yes normal buses bunch, including purposely for peak times where there's lots of passengers.
Re: Why Do Buses Bunch?
#30Would it help to have the trailing bus pass the leading bus when they bunch up? My reasoning: (1) As the article said, full buses move slower because more passengers means more boarding/unboarding time at stops. (2) The lead bus is the fuller, slower one. Slower bus in front means buses get closer together. (3) If one bus passes the other, then you have the faster bus in front and the slower one behind. They should t…
You could probably have a computer calculate which stop the trailing bus should jump ahead to.
Then you have the trailing bus switch to "out of service" mode (so it doesn't enrage people when it passes a bunch of stops) and skip ahead 4 or 5 stops or whatever the computer decides is optimal.