<story><title>The waiting time paradox: why is my bus always late? (2018)</title><url>https://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2018/09/13/waiting-time-paradox/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rjmunro</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s another thing that happens with busses that makes it worse.&lt;p&gt;The further behind the previous bus a bus is, the more people will arrive at the bus stop. The more people there are at the stop, the longer the bus has to spend picking them all up and selling them tickets etc. Therefore the delayed bus will tend to experience more delay. The bus behind them will have less people to pick up, so it will spend a shorter time at stops and tend to catch up with the first bus, so the two busses are dragged towards each other.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bhuber</author><text>This phenomenon consistently happened to my college bus system, but on an even worse scale. The main bus line did a loop around campus, which took ~20 min to complete and buses scheduled every 5 minutes. In reality, you got a caravan of 4 busses arriving every 20 minutes, with the first one totally full and the last practically empty.</text></comment>
<story><title>The waiting time paradox: why is my bus always late? (2018)</title><url>https://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2018/09/13/waiting-time-paradox/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rjmunro</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s another thing that happens with busses that makes it worse.&lt;p&gt;The further behind the previous bus a bus is, the more people will arrive at the bus stop. The more people there are at the stop, the longer the bus has to spend picking them all up and selling them tickets etc. Therefore the delayed bus will tend to experience more delay. The bus behind them will have less people to pick up, so it will spend a shorter time at stops and tend to catch up with the first bus, so the two busses are dragged towards each other.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mitthrowaway2</author><text>That bus with more riders on board also has a higher probability of needing to stop to let people off at each location as well, slowing it down even further!</text></comment>