A Behavioural Explanation of the Association Between Bus and Passenger Arrivals at a Bus Stop.

It is well known that if passengers arrive at a bus stop at random, the average time they have to wait before a bus comes is given by a formulae. However, if there is a published timetable for the service, or if buses tend to run at certain fixed times rather than at others and there are some passengers who frequently make the same, suggest a further improvement. Even at very high average headways, there could not be much reduction of waiting time if the buses were very unreliable, whereas at moderate headways there are considerable potential savings if the buses are very reliable. Consequently, one expect some measure of the day-to-day predictability of the bus service, such as the standard deviation of times of individual buses, to be more meaningfully related to actual average passenger waiting time than is or brand. This approach implies a need for data on bus timings to be collected at the same period of the day repeatedly on several different days, and this article reports on the observation of this kind made in suburban London in the summer of 1974.