[cryptoz]

Not sure about SF, but in Toronto, the only problem is scheduling and management. Also, I won't vouch for Leap or make any assumptions about SF's transit, but if it's anything like Toronto, the only thing you need to change is scheduling. Traffic is not a problem. ONLY SCHEDULING.

The problems in Toronto result in 30-60 minute waits for a bus or a streetcar in the wintertime (during -20°C weather too). Then you will get about 5-10 in a row, all within a few seconds or minutes of each other.

This happens because Toronto does not schedule its transit very well (or at all). So everything is late and miserable.

If Leap schedules things correctly, in part because they are a private company and have incentive to do so, they may be able to beat public transit solutions - in terms of reliability of service - without breaking a sweat.

Again, I don't know how much this info is relevant here or for SF. But there are multiple ways that a private company can improve on the timing and scheduling of existing public transit.

[jfb]

I live in Toronto, and the problem is certainly one of traffic density, exacerbated by the heavy use of streetcars on Queen/King &c and the brain-dead payment model. The TTC doesn't schedule buses and streetcars to stack up -- it happens because of traffic holdups. That's not to say that they couldn't schedule better, of course; I think that dynamic scheduling, where buses can for instance skip stops if there's another following within 90sec or some other heuristic to catch up further on the route.

[alanctgardner3]

> If Leap schedules things correctly, in part because they are a private company and have incentive to do so

I don't know what you think the TTC does all day, but it's not sit around and say "if only we had competition, we'd make the busses better". It may not be possible to schedule to avoid busses bunching up during peak times, if that's how traffic behaves. The only way to fix it might be to run an excess of under-utilized busses, which cuts into profit margins. Which is something a private company with higher rates might be able to do, but the TTC is limited because service has to be accessible to everyone.

The risk of a private company like this showing up is that it'll decide to focus intensively on the 20% of routes that yield 80% of profit. This bleeds the public transit service of funds needed to run less profitable services at off times that are used by people without 9-5 jobs, or people in less privileged areas. So the rich get better bus service, and no longer subsidize the service for the poor.

[lclarkmichalek]

Are you sure that's scheduling and not just the natural grouping up of buses over time? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_bunching

[carapace]

I've lived in SF and Seattle. In SF, in the old days, you got lots of bunching, and usually on particular lines (like the 6 Parnassus which ran in herds), but these days there is very little of that at all. Might have something to do with computerizing the schedules awhile back, I don't know.

In Seattle the buses have posted times on a schedule at each stop and they pretty much nail it in my experience. If a bus is more than about three minutes late people start looking around and checking their watches.