[HN Gopher] Bus Bunching
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Bus Bunching
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 40 points
Date : 2025-07-20 14:24 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.futilitycloset.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.futilitycloset.com)
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| Digital 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 wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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 wrote:
| Let'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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| There 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 wrote:
| You _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 wrote:
| Isn'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 wrote:
| There's both: GTFS is a standard for the regular
| schedule, and GTFS-RT is a standard for realtime
| information.
|
| Link: https://gtfs.org/documentation/realtime/reference/
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| > 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).
| baq wrote:
| Why not both? A QR code with a link to the same content as
| it would've been shown on a display would work quite well
| and provide redundancy in case of display hardware
| malfunctions.
| sho_hn wrote:
| This is what the Berlin system does.
| clickety_clack wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Many 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 wrote:
| Perhaps they should offer a discount for boarding the next
| train or a price increase for boarding the overcrowded one or
| even both?
| closewith wrote:
| Which 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 wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| Certainly 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 wrote:
| bus 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 wrote:
| Anecdotally, I'm pretty sure this phenomenon occurs even with
| bus lanes.
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| You 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.
| brainwad wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| They could probably spread the wait and no one would notice...
| juancroldan wrote:
| If 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 wrote:
| That'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 wrote:
| I 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
| DharmaPolice wrote:
| I get on many buses and 90% of the time the message is played
| about "Evening out the service" it's because the drivers shift
| is about to end and he/she doesn't want to wait at the driver
| changeover stop too long.
| lexlambda wrote:
| Some 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 wrote:
| No-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.
| baq wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Discussion on Wikipedia:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_bunching
|
| Discussion of how to solve it in OpenTTD:
| https://www.openttd.org/news/2024/02/10/unbunching
| sebstefan wrote:
| >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.
| juancroldan wrote:
| In 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 wrote:
| except that bus A must often go to stops that it would skip,
| if any of the passengers want to get off there.
| sebstefan wrote:
| If 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
| derdi wrote:
| Bunching also happens on things like subway lines that have no
| other traffic. Many passengers are irrational about forcing
| their way onto already overcrowded trains.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| It's a coordination problem - taken in isolation, it's not
| irrational. If _only_ you refrain from doing it, and 37 other
| people do, you will still have to wait for the next train,
| and the train in front of you will be almost as late anyways.
| derdi wrote:
| The wait for the next train is one factor, the overcrowding
| is another one. I'm usually not in such a hurry that a
| minute's wait would make a difference. But the next train
| is very likely to be much less crowded and much more
| comfortable to ride on. From my point of view the decision
| is clear, in isolation, just from my own selfish point of
| view. And I think many others are making a choice that
| makes them unhappy. (Train systems differ, the one where I
| live has sufficient capacity that you rarely get two
| overcrowded ones back to back. I know there are places
| where this does not apply.)
| summa_tech wrote:
| It's not as irrational as all that.
|
| Subway system here has an amazing propensity to send random
| trains on express tracks, especially during peak traffic. I
| understand that this is done to alleviate congestion, but the
| net effect is that when you see a train going somewhere you
| want, you _seize the opportunity_.
| closewith wrote:
| Bus lanes exasperate this problem by fast tracking buses to
| common choke points. It's one of the very few disadvantages of
| bus lanes.
| Zambyte wrote:
| What causes the choke points?
| dmd wrote:
| I described this 25 years ago on _blush_ everything2.
|
| https://everything2.com/?node=rutgers+bus+system
| nix0n wrote:
| In 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.
| Lvl999Noob wrote:
| 1. 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 wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _Why Do Buses Bunch?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19558482 - April 2019 (150
| comments)
|
| _Pittsburgh Bus Bunching (2016)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17589349 - July 2018 (60
| comments)
|
| _Why do buses bunch?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9577476 - May 2015 (154
| comments)
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