| 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. |