I'm from a medium-sized city on the US midwest, so my experience is that bus drivers sometimes decide "Fuck it, I'm not coming today," on a route where the schedule says they should be there every 30 minutes. I think most Americans outside of large cities have a similar experience. I was really struck going on vacation to San Francisco how together the bus schedule was, compared to how "meh" laid-back the city institutions I interacted with were about everything else.
Ha! I should have specified, I’m in the US- I think it’s a large number of factors that ultimately boil down to “there’s no incentive to be accurate” our buses are often 15-30 minutes late.
I don’t think this is very typical, but I have even had a bus driver stop mid route, say “this is as far as I’m going today”, kick everybody off, and drive away
That is simply the state of public transportation in the US. I don't use buses very frequently, but the times I had to, my success rate with getting on a bus at the time it was scheduled is somewhere around 40%.
Sometimes it comes 15 minutes late, sometimes it doesn't come entirely and then it's a 30 minute wait (or longer) until the next one. One time it actually came early AND left early. I have no idea what the people who expected it 10 minutes later did. I guess they had to wait 40 minutes.
And it's not a walkable distance either (5-6 miles), so I still have to wait.
Out here (vancouver) operators are allowed to skip stops when full, so they are able to recover from this state gracefully.
Depending on the frequency of the bus route I'd prefer adherence to a schedule vs. efforts to minimize bunching. With frequent buses I think the schedule ends up being irrelevant - but if the hourly bus I occasionally take pulls in fifteen minutes early or late then I will be pissed, especially on the early side.
It's probably okay to drive pedal-to-the-metal on major routes, where it's 5-10 minutes between each bus. In all other cases, however, your potential gain is a couple of minutes, and the person connecting from another bus or simply hopping on in the middle of the route might end up wasting an hour waiting for the next one, even if they were perfectly on time. I'm from a city which is a lot like Berlin, now living in a region where only point A departure times are guaranteed, and it's beyond frustrating.
In smaller cities, buses are frequently on demand service, rather than planned routes (In Michigan, there are many county transit authorities, _ATAs, that do this). It's because they don't have the ridership to support planned routes.
There must be some tension between point to point service and having each passenger walk a few minutes, where the walking ends up saving time, even if it doesn't seem like it.
This is not true in my experience, Seattle has a pretty solid bus system and we still felt like we were having to plan around them even though they generally would stop every 15 minutes. You could not count on them 100% either. Occasionally they just don't show up.
I come from São Paulo, a bigger, poorer, and more chaotic city than LA. The bus system there was much more reliable than in LA. And I am talking here about 5 or 6 buses at any given time on a circular route that's probably less than 5 miles total.
Of course, I am reliving my frustration on these times that I have to wait more time at a bus stop than I spend inside the bus, so it is a harsh critique. But I do think it's fair and justified.
When I did a couple bus commutes while living in OC, I remember the bus actually stopping on the side of the road for a while because it had got ahead of schedule. Probably a good thing given the infrequency of buses for the buses to stick religiously to the schedule (as opposed to suburban Chicago where I live now where it's actually impossible for the buses to meet the posted schedules even if they travel at the speed limit without stopping).
I haven't read the article, but I ride the bus a lot. Here is my subjective take: bus drivers get into a very distinct and slow pattern of their bus driving behavior. Slow to do everything, never not taking their break, never attempting to make up for lost time.
So in their daily routine, the traffic between stops is variable, but their little rituals and apathy to the travel plight of passengers is not.
They also like to take up time socializing between driver swaps, which aren't accounted for in bus schedules. Thus the largest factor is bus A may have no traffic, and bus B had a lot, but their stops at each place take the same amount of time, thus they end up clumping when traffic let's one drive between stops faster than the other, who will still be on his break at the Bart station.
I just checked the bus stop near my parents' place in Miami (I'm living in NYC now). The next bus arrives in 14 hours lol. Busses for that stop run hourly between 11am-4pm.
I don't get how they think anyone can depend on that. Not only is an hour between busses incredibly frustrating, if I needed to do anything past 4pm, (like I don't know... commute to work?) I would have no way back home until the next day.
The German bus systems I’ve used have been night and day better than US ones. Buses that mostly run to a schedule are incomprehensible to most in the US.
Probably related, I doubt we have a bus line with anywhere near that ridership.
That sounds pretty good compared to my Midwest experiences :|
Hourly schedule, literally never fits the times presented so you just go and wait. And sometimes you end up waiting 1.5 hours with nothing, so you call up the station to find out wtf and they have no idea where the bus is. "It should be there soon!" -> it finally comes after 2.5 hours.
This happened at least 4 times in the 30 or so attempts I made to use it to get to college. A mere 3 miles away. Then I gave up and just walked or drove. Eventually attended a town hall, and the higher-ups claimed no knowledge of any of this. Last I heard it was still performing at the same level.
I assume they were either skipping our stops to fake a normal round-trip time, or just disappearing for an hour or two to smoke.
My father was a school bus driver. The pickup and drop off routes were often 3 hours each, as they were mandated by local law to provide service to the whole country.
Kindergarten is just half a day in many places, so the middle of the day would be another 3 hours to shift those around.
There were also many field trips, sporting events, and other miscellaneous calls for transport throughout the day and into the evenings, as well as some weekends.
Much of all of this would vary quite a bit depending on a particular town’s location, population needs, layout, etc. but I just wanted to say that although it’s a relatively chill job and there is indeed often a lot of downtime, it’s not like bus drivers universally work 1 hr in the morning, 1 hr in the afternoon, and then just bum around all day.
Yeah, but not in America, which is what we are talking about. I used to live in San Diego and took buses that ran once an hour. A high frequency bus was one that ran every 30 minutes.
I certainly don't. The bus I was taking was a double-long that ran every 3 minutes and I'd still end up standing outside in the rain while a half dozen buses went past before I could get on one because they were all full. And once you get on, you're on a bus that's ass-to-crotch packed for an hour. And that's never mind the actual behaviour of the other people on the bus.
And this was after I modified my work hours to take the bus during less-peak time.
So now I drive. It's about the same time, but in mostly stop and go traffic. I can listen to podcasts and don't have people literally sitting on top of me, but I also have to deal with being constantly hyper-vigilant because (1) people drive like fuckwads and (2) traffic patterns in a lot of places are really screwed up and being in the wrong lane at the wrong time can wind up easily adding 30% to your commute time and (3) the cyclists have this bad habit of trying to weave through moving traffic instead of using the bike lanes and following the traffic signals and then physically assaulting you if you don't notice them and give way.
Interestingly enough, I ran into an extreme of this on Saturday; while I wasn't inconvenienced by it (the bus showed up 2 minutes after I arrived at the stop), I overheard the bus driver talking to riders he seemed to know as regulars.
This bus was on time, but there hadn't been a bus for over a 45 minutes; the schedule defined the interval as 1 bus / 7 minutes.
There were seven busses on the same route directly behind us.
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