[andreareina]

Disclaimer: not a transportation engineer.

I wonder what it would look like if departure times were enforced in the don't-leave-before direction. Then giving enough time between scheduled stops that e.g. 90% of buses traveling that stretch can make it in time for that day/time combination. I realize that doesn't mean that 90% of trips will be on-time due to how failures will cascade, but it should eventually catch up due to the slack provided.

The big question is whether people will accept the increased latency (and total trip times) for less variance in waiting time and trip time.

[cimmanom]

As a bus rider whose drivers on one route sometimes do this, I loathe it.

The problem is that the route timing is designed for a specific traffic and ridership level. The actual time to run the route can vary by a factor of 3 or more depending on whether it’s before, during, or after rush hour.

The route timing is designed for after rush hour traffic levels, when it takes about 45-50 min to travel from my stop to my office stop. During rush hour, this trip can take 90 minutes. Before rush hour, it can take 20 on a good day.

So now, if I leave before rush hour, a commute that could be 20 minutes becomes 50 minutes. On a bus that is scheduled to arrive every 7 minutes - so bunching means waiting 15-20 minutes for a bus: LESS commuter time wasted by bunching than is spent sticking strictly to the schedule.

On buses that run even more frequently (one every 2-3 or 3-5 min during rush hour), this would be ridiculous. People aren’t catching the bus on a schedule - they just walk out the door whenever they’re ready, and expect a bus to turn up within a few minutes.

On a bus that’s scheduled to run once every 20 min (and you can wait an hour for a bus if they bunch), people are more invested in the schedule. I don’t actually trust the schedule at all unless within a few stops of the start of the route, and usually use the “just walk out the door” method anyway; but would appreciate and use the schedule if it were reliable.

So: as a bus rider I might support this, but they would have to fix the schedules. Create and enforce bus lanes. Run more buses - so that even when you get more riders than usual they can carry all the passengers at rush hour without being so packed that it takes 5 min to cram each new passenger aboard and half the bus has to debark to let someone off the middle. Then a little bit of traffic is less likely to create bunching.

[andreareina]

I probably didn't do a good job of explaining it, but fixing the schedule was part of the suggestion. So for your example, rush hour timing would allow ~50 minutes between your stops, then after that only 20 minutes.

[remarkEon]

I suspect they would. Predictability in public transit is hugely important. People base a lot of their routines on these schedules. I also think enforcing stop/departure times is probably a much more elegant solution than controlling speed.