bussing logistics

[pktechgirlbackup]

There are two bus lines that start in down town, travel a shared route, pass my house, arrive at a major destination and hub, and only then go their separate ways. Depending on how far up the line you are going, which bus you can take can be critical or completely inconsequential. In theory, they are each scheduled to run twice an hour, at a 15 minute offset from each other, so each shared stop is hit every 15 minutes. In practice, riders who don't care which bus they take dominate, and so any bus that gets even a little delayed gets more delayed by picking up riders who would have taken the other bus, which lets the other bus go even faster, so by the time they reach my house they're often right next to each other- which means the 3rd bus will be super delayed picking up all the people that missed the 2nd bus, which means the 4th will speed through... This screwed me back when I needed to continue on the line and so only one of the routes would do, but when I'm just going home, I'm as guilty of anyone of taking the first bus that comes along. You see a minor version of this problem in the downtown corridor, but that's so well traveled that it doesn't reach critical mass the way these routes do.

There's a number of solutions, none of them satisfactory. You could have the speedy bus deliberately slow down. Practiced consistently, this will prevent the delays/accelerations from spiraling, so you'll spend less time deliberately waiting than current data would indicate. Nonetheless, I assume riders would revolt over a bus deliberately sitting still. If a bus can go, it should go. The driver could try to disguise this by driving slowly, but that would screw car traffic. It's not realistic to expect people who are bus-agnostic to deliberately wait 15 minutes to avoid slowly down the current bus. Lastly, you could sever the connection between the shared corridor and the separate routes- i.e. run one "route" every 15 minutes between downtown and the last shared stop, and two others from that shared stop to their various destinations. But the only way this lets the later stops get served on time is if the metro system actually sends busses to the last shared stop independent of the busses traveling the shared route, which they won't do. Speeding up on- and off-boarding would be great (especially for wheelchairs- I swear, it's like they want people to beat the handicapped), and they're working on it, but until the onboarding time is independent of the number of people boarding, it's not a solution.

The only one of these that will actually work is setting timing points for the bus and not letting it exceed them (or not let them exceed them by more than a certain amount). I've seen busses wait at the stop before a hub because they're not allowed to get to the hub early, and this is just an extension of that. So suck it up, people who don't want the bus to idle. This is good for all of us.

Comments

[crystalpyramid]

NYC definitely makes buses idle and wait at timing points so thry won't get ahead of schedule. Doesn't quite fix the problem of them always being behind schedule, but it definitely makes it easier to catch a bus when it has to wait for its scheduled time. Not all the drivers follow the rules, but the M15 was under increased scrutiny when I lived there, since they're trying to figure out how to fix it. That helped. Back when I took the M101 crosstown, they always came in pairs at random half-hour intervals, no matter what the schedule said.