Bunching: A Transit User’s Worst Nightmare?
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- čas přidán 12. 01. 2024
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Bus bunching and transit bunching in general sucks - but what causes it and how can we fix it? Find out in my latest video!
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Regular reminder that all new videos in 2024 have English-language captions!
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Did they used to have other-language captions? Har har!
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Awesome work, thank you for this
Waiting 20 minutes for an "every 10 minutes" bus and then three buses showing up is an experience everyone who has ever used transit has had.
Thats why no matter what anything under 20min is Magically. Mystriously way to earlly.. Cause you given up on it lolz
One of the many disadvantages of bus transit and a dead giveaway for whenever anyone argues in bad faith that a rail project which being suggested by a competent transport planning authority could be done "just as well but more cheaply by bus"
@@kyletopfer7818 so they make Bunches of Bus act like Train???? Lordy
@@haisheauspforte1632 location... America ist nicht good ja
Oooooo
It's one thing if a route running every 5-10 minutes run back to back. It's another thing when this happens to a route running once every 30 minutes.
Absolutely right. In my area, there are two bus routes that just follow the main road between two major shopping centres then to different suburbs past there. They schedule each of these for every 30 minutes but they come together rather than spread out in between. Essentially two buses every 30 minutes rather than one every 15.
@@justinsimmonds5674 I used to see this all the time in San Diego from wheelchair users, or other riders with limited mobility issues. breaking the gap back apart is the most difficult part, until low-floor or level boarding can be established.
There have been times where I've wondered if the drivers are doing that because they feel there is safety in numbers so they don't end up getting jumped by gang members in the more dangerous parts of town.
@@justinsimmonds5674 Sounds like my city`s bus service. Runs every 35 minutes day time and an hour and 10 minutes evenings. Whats worse is some routes only run one bus making it extremely inconvenient especially in the evening when if you just miss the earlier bus you have over an hour wait for the nect one. I have actually ended up walking for 45 minutes several times since it`s faster than waiting for the next bus.
@@kirikanoir2403 Wow… just wow… The bus route that passes out the back of my house runs hourly. Oftentimes faster to catch one of the other routes and contend with a steep hill. I calculated the slope on this hill as roughly 1 metre elevation change for every 10 metres of walking. This accounts for about 250 metres out of an 800 metre walk.
In London, when they started tracking all the busses by GPS, busses bunched up behind started waiting for a few minutes to even out the service. They'd play an automated PA, that went something like "this bus will wait here for a few minutes to even out the service". Unfortunately this led to a fairly extreme reactions by frustrated passengers, such as shouting at drivers, even some abuse. No excuse for that of course, but they had to stop doing it! I think the practice now is for the bus affected will be told to deliberately drive slowly. The announcement is still used very occasionally but they're quite rare now.
I’ve heard that announcement recently, although not as much as before.
Montreal has had GPS tracking for about 5 years, but the recorded announcements that you mentioned for London only started a few months ago here.
@@TheScrollLock1I've lived in London all my life, and it's happened for years if I remember correctly
If you're slowing down / keeping a bus to wait, does this mean the driver will have to turn early later on, lose the layover completely at the terminus or run not in service to catch up where they should be? There are legal driving hour restrictions that must be met.
Sometimes the deliberate slow driving is anoying, because you miss your connection because of it
In the Netherlands, the amount of signal priority is actually based on their delay. The first of a bus bunched, being delayed, will have more priority while the second bus will not get any priority. Also a good way to de-bunch busses, I think.
Besides that, busses in the NL have a system telling the driver is being behind, on time or delayed. Look at the little screen they have in front of them. GReen is on time, red is delayed and as far I know, it also can be yellow/orange. But it can also be red when they are to early! I've been in busses, just waiting a minute or two at a stop, before continueing the ride.
@JaapGinder nice
I know Alstom has an ATP system for trams. Does the Netherlands have anything like that for their busses or trams?
@@JaapGinder this is common in every country (at least in Europe). Even in rural Slovakia, on buses that go to villages with population of 100, in the middle of the mountains.
bus drivers also tend to wait at a stop if they notice they are earlier than they should be.
might seem strange for a bus to just wait 5 minutes at a stop before continuing their route, but if they would arrive before their scheduled time people could miss the bus because the bus should have been at their stop yet.
and if a bus is really behind schedule they sometimes skip stops that are serviced by several (bus) lines, so the bus has the opportunity to get back on schedule and those people could still take one of the other busses. this "bus stop skipping" is only really done at places where several lines converge, like at train stations.
and if a bus is late they can request other busses to wait for a couple of minutes so people on the late bus can still make their transfer to those other lines.
I used to take a specific bus route in Toronto every day, and EVERY DAY leaving work, rather than the maximum wait time of 15 minutes it should have been, I would wait between 30 min and 1 hr before three or four buses would show up. It was the most consistent and frustrating thing in my life at the time. I sent complaints every month or so, but it never changed. It was only so frustrating because I KNEW there must be a solution to make it at least a little better, but I’m sure the operators simply did not care to solve the problem. I started fantasizing about stealing a radio and directing the drivers myself based on the real-time arrivals GPS system they use/Nextbus app.
That sucks, my recommendation for a situation like this is calling your city councillor and emailing them as well as the TTC. And doing so regularly!
Toronto and Montreal public transports are national embarrassments.
The problem becomes even more complex when it happens with buses from different routes. Like, not a bus for 5 mins straight, then 5 buses from different routes show up at once at the stop simply doesn't fit them. It is even more frustrating, when the buses have gps tracking, and the authorities aren't doing anything about it...
I've seen plenty of memes that say "when you've waited 30 minutes for your bus but there's so many buses in the way that he skips your stop". Really common in Latin America.
It's worth noting that a situation like that could involve buses dispatched from multiple depots.
One thing that can be done is having separate bus stops for specific routes.
@@sonicboy678 usually in London, different bus routes in the same direction will share a bus stop. But where they are shortly about to branch off in different directions, there will usually be separate stops, depending on the road layout, frequency of service, etc.
@@christopherwaller2798 In Paris, a stop cannot be shared by more than 3 lines at a time. on the busiest routes, a stop can only serve 2 lines. It leads to the multiplication of stops and a pain to search which stop is your line though :D
"I think we're going to need a bigger bus stop"...
If I’m in a hurry I get infuriated when the bus sits at an empty stop for no apparent reason. However I think the reason is probably that they are countering bunching. Great video thank you!
Or just keeping to the schedule
It is indeed annoying if you want to catch a train, but most often the bus is just too early indeed.
The only time the buses in my area do that is if they realise they’re ahead of schedule.
In a reasonable transit system, a bus would only sit at a stop if it were early. Where I live buses usually only stop if they are more than two minutes early or the bus driver has to do something very important on the phone. Oh, we also have that bus driver who randomly stops sometimes to take pictures of the sunset.
I hate it when the bus waits for someone who isn't at the stop yet and that person doesn't even make an effort to get there quickly. Even worse is when that idiot holds up the bus by asking the driver for directions. Usually it is some homeless bum who wants to find Walmart but doesn't know where it is.
Another potential good idea is to let the rear emptier bus overtake the delayed bus and also have both buses exchange their schedules so the emptier bus can play catchup eaiser while the fuller bus can have some capacity to play with
This actually happened in my city when two buses were too close the one in the front skip a stop leaving passengers to the bus in the back, and then in the next stop the bus in the front stops so the other can skip that stop.
I think that is allowed in principle in may cities, but there aren't a lot of opportunities for one bus to overtake another on many busy streets.
Many of our buses are trolley buses and that's just not possible. I once was on a bus with a brand-new driver and he didn't switch for a turn and the amount of detour we had to take to get back on the right set of cables!
@@EricaGamet solution: ahead tbus and benhind tbus both stop at bus stop. Ahead tbus skips 2-5 stops while behind tbus makes all stops. Ahead tbus gains capacity to catch up and behind tbus gets fuller and the bunching is cleared. (Ofc this would req radio comms to arrange)
On the minus side, on can argue, if you sit on the already delayed bus, from your perspective it would become even more delayed. On paper it would be on time, but you have taken this bus and not the next one for a reason. I would want my bus to at least *try* to arrive at the time it is supposed to be and not change it's shedule in the middle of the ride.
MBTA loooves having duplicate (or semi-duplicate) routes especially outside of downtown. Usually theyll have 30-45 minute headways and it's always hilarious having BOTH buses one after the next
I would love to live somewhere where the busses are frequent enough for bunching to be a problem.
Come to Estonia, we have free public transport for residents and zero bunching.
I used to study in Utrecht, where I took the infamous bus 12. The thing was a bi-articulated bus on a 2,5 minute schedule from the central station to campus and a major hospital nearby. That basically was a bunched line of busses throughout rushour. Just one bus after the other with the occasional bus from another line in between. They put a tramline in since then.
@@fromhigherground4272 Yeah and that's all you have 😂
@@radoskan Pretty ignorant, the Baltic countries are really on a par with western European countries in terms of living standards at this point, but with housing / food etc costs still being a fair bit more reasonable. The ex-USSR stereotypes really don't apply.
We all know mr bob..
As a note with London busses if bunching occurs usually the bus is told to wait at the stop to even out the service, this is usually is accompanied by announcement saying what is happening.
Bunching is a common occurrence on the corridors of the jitneys in Hudson County, NJ because there is no preset timetable. NJ Transit is put at a disadvantage because not only do these jitneys show up way more often than NJ Transit buses do, but the jitney drivers all speak Spanish. They appeal to Latinos. A high percentage of Hudson County is Latino, and by being Latino-owned and operated, they take advantage of this. Frequency is their key to success, so even though they charge more than NJT, people still take them because they show up first. They also have the advantage of stopping at every single corner. They operate between George Washington Bridge, Journal Square, and Newport Centre mall, and some go to the PABT as well.
Similar situation in Flatbush, Brooklyn. But a difference is there, the jitneys are operated by and served for West Indians. When the MTA discontinues bus routes in Brooklyn and Queens, these vans take over. During periods when even limited public mass transit is unavailable, such as the January 2005 Green Bus Lines and Command Bus Company strike or the December 2005 New York City transit strike, these vans were crucial.
As a bus driver with several years of experience driving high frequency routes through busy neighborhoods, what my colleagues and I would do is play leapfrog. I regularly pushed the bleeding edge of my schedule, leaving runners for the next bus. As a result, I regularly caught up with my leader, and I would pass them whenever nobody onboard pulled the stop request and speed onto the next stop, picking up all my leader's passengers and allowing them to become a de-facto drop-off only bus. That would allow them to make up time and pass me again. Leapfrogging minimized my leader's subsequent delay, and relieved them of some of their work. Back at the garage, there was a group of drivers not well liked because they wouldn't play leapfrog and just let their leaders do all the work.
Love that you're taking this on, Reece. This is so much of what working transit planners in North America have to deal with on a daily basis, and try to explain to the public when we are, for example, proposing to remove stops. Also really looking forward to your headway management vid.
Thanks, that's great to hear! It's not easy but it's important work!
Exactly, transit priority signals are extremely important, just having transit priority signals can go a long way! Transit is a service to the people, and of course they're longer than cars and carry way more people than a car so it must have priority to get everyone inside where they need to go in a timely manner instead of contributing to congestion on the roads. When there's transit priority signals, bus lanes, or even a dedicated bus highway like in Pittsburgh, these are the things that make a city's transit network so much better. In Pittsburgh's case, the South Busway opened in 1977 along the Route 51 corridor to allow buses to skip the crowded and light-filled Route 51! And it provides connections to the city's light-rail.
Another example of a bus highway is the Adelaide O-Bahn guided busway. Built to serve Adelaide's suburbs, its unique feature of a non-transfer service direct from suburban streets to the city center made it attractive. Adelaide's track is 12 km/7.5 mi long and includes three interchanges at Klemzig, Paradise and Tea Tree Plaza. Interchanges allow buses to enter and exit the busway and to continue on suburban routes, avoiding the need for passengers to transfer to another bus to continue their journey. Not to mention, the O-Bahn has sump buster devices to prevent cars.
“The green wave”, which moves at the speed of public transit, is nice for bicycle riders as well, because they can also utilize it.
Potentially, though ideally PT is moving faster. This is why having separate bike routes from major roads is often seen as advantageous!
In Hong Kong, bunching is very common which are typical bad, but there are certain routes that intentionally bunch because the number of people waiting is overwhelming that a single double-decker per minute is far too little to handle, but they are regulated that they cannot divert away from the original route to reach the destination quicker. Therefore, the solution is to have multiple buses bunch up on departure, so that everyone can get on the bus fairly easily. This is where the best long-term solution is to split routes but it's not so easy.
In Dresden it is common that the empty bus overtakes the full bus so it can clear the upcoming stops. And in my experience bunching is a sign for an overwhelmed transit form, so another solution could be to switch from bus service in that certain route to tram or from tram to stadtbahn/metro.
Toronto is very focused on complaining about the regular driving experience while fully depending on long from built new transit without bothering to do much to improve what we have. It's ridiculous that we don't have transit priority signals configured for every major surface transit route.
I love the NYC Subway solution to this: if downtown 6 trains are delayed, and the train in front could delay the train behind, they make an announcement that the next stop is bleeker st and then brooklyn bridge. This skips Astor place, Spring st, and Canal St, so a bunch of people get off. But when you do hear the announcement it doesnt take much thinking to realise that another 6 train is probably just behind it.
Another problem with bunching is that beacause people have been waiting for so long for a bus, they all get on the lead bus as soon as it arrives, so when the second bus gets to the station there's almost no people. Then most users will feel that the buses are overcrowded, even though the total capacity could have been enough for everyone to go comfortably.
One reason they all get on the first bus is the fear that, while you run along to the second bus, it will depart, and then the first one will leave while you are racing back to that! This is worse in places like rural UK, where two- or three-door buses are unheard of.
Live bus times on stops can help with that. Sometimes I'll see an absolutely rammed bus, notice that there's one only a few minutes behind, and decide to wait for that.
This would be a great problem to have in my town where buses only come every 30 minutes. If they're early and you miss it, that's a 30 minute wait, which means you'll likely be very late for whatever you needed to get to. Waiting for 10 minutes and having 2 buses show up would still be a better experience than what we have. XD
i would really love to see a video talk about paratransit, which while it doesn't often bunch suffers from just about every problem associated with it. It's always extremely far behind schedule in a way that increases throughout the day (hope you like getting home from work 3 hours late), very high stress and unpredictable, its a genuine nightmare. The nightmare is always worse in places that have no other transit to speak of (urban sprawl, especially low income areas that can't afford a 'real' bus system and have a lot of elderly and disabled people). very, very few people are aware of how unbelievably bad it is, and it would mean a lot to see somebody talk about it, since it's a fact of life for people who must rely on paratransit in areas that don't have 'real' transit.
I would do it myself but I think I would start screaming and never stop haha
"special" transit sub systems don't get the attention they need as "normal" people do NOT interact with these systems so they are the ones under funded OR cut when funding "decisions" need to be made
A major factor in bunching is having to load disabled passengers via the lift, which can massively increase the amount of time needed at a stop, especially since the driver generally has to leave his/her seat to secure the wheelchair and then un-secure it when the person wants to get off again.
You mentioned frequency, which exacerbates the risk of bunching. There's another parameter which is line length : the longer the line, the more delay (or advance) a vehicle is likely to get. So designing the network by avoiding needlessly long lines is also a measure to improve reliability, like transit priority (but cheaper).
Hey Reece! Longtime viewer (since you had around 20k subs I think?) and I’ve just gotta say, the production quality of your videos lately has been fantastic! The graphics in particular have really been stepped up since I first started watching (did you even have graphics back then?) and especially in the past few months - keep it up! You’re easily one of my favorite transit-oriented channels
Thank you! I did not have a lot of graphics early on, have really been trying to do more and better especially this year with less videos!
😅Once i saw a bus being overtaken by the same busline, supposed to go every 20 min. They kept overtaking eachother for the rest of the line. This is extremely rare and was probably caused by a road incident earlier.
The first bunching was kind of helped a little bit by the fact that the empty bus kept overtaking the delayed bus at bus stops.
Which is very stupid if you are on a bus, but the next bus which normally goes 15 minutes later, passes you, becoming the lead bus, but after everyone has already been picked up, so then instead of the front bus being the slowest, the back bus is the slowest (last time that happened to me I tried transferring to the front bus during a loop in the route but I missed it)
At least new passengers get on the fast bus at that point instead of making the slow bus even slower.
@@falsemcnuggethope Unless if the overtake happens so close to the end location where the only part where it might be useful is on a route where there are already super frequent busses and not a lot of people at that time
Bus bunching is the perfect argument for dedicated lanes.
Bunching still happens in bus lanes, traffic lights make it so much worse than tram bunching
Dedicated lanes, bus priority traffic lights, and articulated buses. Where possible of course.
EDIT: And card readers for bus routes at Metro/subway stations.
BTW, sorry if I'm repeating things Reese said in the video. I can't remember every detail. (He did mention the articulated bus thing)
But bus lane will only work if there is also priority at traffic lights. And (above all) the 'random delays' which occur when drivers have to sell tickets must be ended by taking all sales of tickets 'off bus'.
@@TheScrollLock1 the city of Bogota has most of these and is seen as the gold standard for BRT, look up "Transmilenio Traffic Jam" Buses are helpful but theyre not the answer and trying to accomodate everything to make them the answer, its objectively wrong
Yeah, I was surprised to see that Reece didn't talk about it, especially because it makes the schedule more consistent on busy streets.
I have NEVER seen buses in Charlotte be bunched up like that... granted I also never see them on time in the first place, but that's a different story 😅
Oh, I see the problem. Almost no one uses Charlotte's buses so they can't fall behind with passengers... :(
In Turin in the 80's ATM (now GTT) developed a management system to keep the service more regular and to know what happens on the vehicles. In the 2000's this was updated and now every driver knows if they are on schedule and distance from the previous and the following veicle and obviously communicate with the management center.
Last month, for the first time ever in Sydney, I was waiting for a bunched bus and the first one went on "set down only" and skipped our stops to catch up with timetable. Just 2 minutes later another came long. I thought this was great.
I would rather have a bus go on set-down only now and then than removing stops.
Most of these suggestions seem super do-able and practical, but fewer stops creates accessibility issues. If you're walking to the bus stop with a mobility aid or small children an additional 2 blocks can actually be pretty far. I rarely see elderly and disabled people, or parents with small children on busses outside of the downtown core, and I wonder if the distance between stops plays a role in this (of course there are several other reasons too, but it would be interesting to know if this is a factor).
I consider there to be a far worst nightmare for transit users: The Short Turn. Especially at night in bad winter weather, being dumped short of your destination in an unfamiliar neighbourhood with no idea when the next vehicle is coming especially when you had timed your trip as precisely as you could in advance to get to where you need to on time and now are at risk of being late? Horrific. I had this happen on the 511 streetcar in Toronto the other night and was reminded of how unreliable this makes transit seem. I would love for you to do a video on short turns similar to this one. Does it even happen with other transit agencies?
we have this here with regional trains. They go into the city on one line and out on the other - but skipping the always chaotic Hamburg Hauptbahnhof saves about half an hour.
It's always fun when the short turn and full route buses are bunched and the short turn bus pulls over for you four stops before it ends and the full route bus drives away.
Happens a fair amount in London but they usually try to do it at somewhere you can interchange with other routes in the same direction. That said, I've been terminated short at random places like West Green (near Seven Sisters which is a more useful place, but still in the middle of residential side streets!)
IMHO a short turn bus doing it for anti bunching purposes like suggested is BAD enough to cause people to NOT USE transit next time and I would say is so bad bunching is a BETTER solution then tossing people off a bus so the bus can change routes leaving them standing outside in an area they are not familiar with OR comfortable in
Yeah, short turning should only be an absolute last resort solution. DB has been doing short turns on very delayed long distance trains for a couple of years (nicknamed Pofalla-Wende after the guy who came up with the idea) and while from an operation standpoint it kind of makes sense, as a passenger it’s about the worst thing I can imagine. Because it turns from „oh well we might have 2h delay, but at least it’s only two more stops“ to „where the hell am I and how do I get home“. Delays are already stressful and irritating, adding a sudden change in service and forcing people to change vehicles creates frustration on a level where it might make them choose another transit mode next time.
I love how at the start of the video, while Reece is asking "Have you ever...?" the video shows a bus from my home town, where yes, yes I have. Many times.
Ticketing here wasn't an issue for me since the only thing a passenger had to do was to tap it's smart card into the reader and it was ready to go in the blue corridor(Lima). The real cause of bunching when i tried to return home was bad infrastructure. You see, in the line covered by the blue corridor there are 2 bypasses and none of them were intended to put public transit as a priority. moreover, it is a place where you can often find vehicles in a gridlock. The result that you will have is 5 up to six buses from different routes bunched up.
The worst nightmare is missing a connection ... when said connecting was the last possible option for the day.
In Berlin these kind of busses are called Rudelbusse (Pack Busses). In the last five years it got worse. More and more lines are effected. Another phenomenon in Berlin are subway ghost trains. The Daisy System shows that the next train should come in 4 minutes. These 4 minutes run down (Sometime it takes 6 minutes to do so.) and it start to blink, like the train is coming now. It blinks for several minutes, than it disappear from the board and the next normal train shows up. I wonder what happened to all the trains. Wormholes?
Happens quite often in the Lisboa metro area. Cadencies are schedule quite wide and during rush hour it gets even worse since bus lanes are non existent. A lot of people opt to drive instead which as we all know makes traffic even worse.
I'm a bus driver usually the controllers are allowed tell drivers who are ahead of schedule to slow down but aren't allowed tell drivers who are behind schedule to speed up as that could be dangerous.
One thing you didn't mention is route length. Cities with super long bus routes tend to have much more of a bunching problem, as these long routes are more likely to be impacted by bunching.
I know we're not supposed to point this out, but the biggest initiator of bunching, particularly on any network with high-step boarding, is wheelchair loading.
I remember San Diego Transit used to have high-floor buses, and loading or unloading a single wheelchair could take 5-7 minutes. On 15 minute headways, that one rider could eat the entire spacing just by getting on and off the bus.
Near as I can tell, low-floor buses and level boarding is a hugely essential part of the solution, far more than station number or spacing.
Hello, bus driver here. 👋
The type of vehicle is also important. Double decker buses have longer dwell times at bus stops because it takes longer for people to go up and down the stairs. An articulated bus would carry as many passengers but they would be able to board and alight faster.
The other thing is how many doors there. Most buses in the UK are single door so this also slows things down as everyone has to enter and exit the vehicle through a single point. Ideally there should be two or more doors per vehicle but whilst the UK bus system is geared more towards a revenue seeking model rather than a public service model, we're likely to stay with single door buses.
As rightly pointed out, a ton of things can cause bunching. In Chicago, I find a ton of time is spent boarding passengers on buses, as boarding/fare paying can only happen from the front. I understand the North American fear that boarding from all doors might lead to some people not fare dodging, but if it leads to the system operating more efficiently and reliably (which would increase ridership), that seems like a trade-off worth making.
The MTA here seems to allow lateness, but not running early, so drivers will sometimes stop and wait for the schedule to catch up. Plus if there’s bunching the lead bus will stop while the trailing bus will move to the next stop (if no one is getting off there). They’ll then continue to pass each other like this to try to stop overcrowding at stops, or on the bus itself. Of course if one bus is stuffed to the gills they won’t stop to pick up more passengers at all.
Nothing is more annoying than getting to the bus stop on time; only to miss the bus because the cowboy driver decided to go early.
I love the video! I find a bus in Ottawa interesting because they purposely send 2 buses out at the same time sometimes, so the two buses can take turns picking people up and leapfrog each other at each stop, effectively halving the stops and saving me a lot of time. However, when the buses are doing pick up and drop off or mostly drop off both buses stop together pretty often, which isn't as great.
so a labour expensive way to NOT buy bendys and get the capacity of bendys
have seen it done as a feed in for a overload relief bus at the start of "rush hour" or a factory let out second bus tails the first till the first is full and starts skipping stops and the second then takes over but this is used on a VERY unbalanced line where pickups are way higher then drop offs
I think the one situation where you might want multiple buses at a time is when there is a replacement service for a (less frequent) train (due to construction works), and they all leave after the train arrives and people switch over. (Though even then it might be useful to add another bus in-between the bunches.)
Also, it's really noticable you were in Berlin recently - a lot of Berlin footage mixed in.
About ticketing causing delays (text at 4:17): Some intercity buses from Umea get delayed significantly by ticket and bagage handling at the university hospital bus terminal. It's so bad that they might accumulate a 10-minute delay en-route further north. There's also a particularly bad signalled intersection in Umea, where buses frequently get stuck. This particular traffic light is on a road section between the intercity coach station and the UH, a 2 km section with six signalled intersections, none of which are transit-prioritized.
This is one of the best produced RMTransit videos I've ever seen.
When i started studying urban planning in the middle of copenhagen, it was my first experience with "big city" transit.
I had never seen bunching before and was just so flabbergasted at 3 busses showing up at once, then being stuck in traffic for 20 minutes for a walk that could take 5 minutes on foot.
My regular route often involves mandatory stops to adhere to the timetable, often for several minutes when traffic is light. Even though I know that it means I will still reach my destination at the scheduled time I suppose it's just human to feel slightly frustrated by not moving.
Reminds me of timetable padding, another thing Reece has made a video on
From my experience, this is a solvable problem. Where I live, it seems the public transport department empirically collected the data and set the schedule accordingly. For example, the same bus reaches the destination faster or slower according to the timetable depending on the time of the day. But why is it slower? Because there's rush hour and the bus is stuck in traffic! There are still certain times when a bus might stop for a minute but those are quite rare and happen around the start/end of the rush hour, when the traffic situation is not as constant.
The timetable padding in London is more noticeable off peak and at night. During Covid lockdowns it was very noticeable as there was far less traffic and fewer bus passengers.
I hate it when they have this kind of delay shortly before the end of the route.
seen it at the ENDS of routes often at interchange stops say at a MALL or "bus row" also gives time for the operator to "take care of nature" and grab a snack stretch legs ETC
Here in Portland, OR, you'll occasionally see a bus from another line behind a bus on another line, because many of our routes share the same bus stops with eachother. It's always kinda funny to see that. But after we opened up our first Frequent Express line - buses that run every 12 minutes or less in a semi-BRT system - it's really not uncommon to see a normal bus following right behind the iconic green bus, which is even more hilarious.
My university’s transit system somehow manages to have this so badly😭 the route I take has 2 buses on it and it takes 30 minutes (with light traffic) to complete the loop, so on a good day there’s 15 minute headways (no schedule, you kind of just have to hope). The issue is that SO OFTEN they get bunched up, so you can barely miss the two buses and at that point it’s quicker to just walk rather than wait the 30 min for a bus route that would’ve saved me 5-10 minutes
In Detroit one culprit I've noted is school traffic, Between about 2:30 and 4:00 some routes get overwhelmed with high school students and there are no extra buses to accomodate them. But the worst offenders are the oversized trains that can spend over an hour blocking an east-west arterial road while they uncouple and recouple cars in yards that are not meant to accomodate trains of that size.
My worst nightmare is when a crazy person/people enters the train car I'm in. While I keep hearing there is more protection on the trains in my area, I never see it.
WHAT CRAZY PEROS Holy crap hold my Hand Waht.. WHO.. It's 009 And the quuen frozen
I really can't say which song Floor sings is my favorite, it always depends on my mood - but I can say one thing; when I often lack energy during the long polar night, this is the song I listen to the most (several times a day).
But no matter what Floor sings, she always gives me exactly what I need to feel good. That's what I call art
Bad as bunching is (and I encountered a conga line of six buses in Stoneybatter in Dublin yesterday evening), what's worse is the ghost bus: the scheduled bus that never arrives. This can be a consequence of bunching, but I've also seen it happen at times where traffic hasn't been bad enough to cause delays.
In Warsaw, a city with A LOT of long, cross-city bus lines bunching can sometimes go to the extreme of 4 or even 5 buses arriving at stops together. But there are lines without bunching, and these are lines running on corridors with separate bus lanes.
4:40 Finally some footage from Tallinn, Estonia. Any chance of a dedicated video about Tallinn? If no, a video about the Rail Baltic project would be interesting.
Thanks for that video!
We have several bus stops in my neighbourhood that are now unused because of bunching. The service is every 7-10 minutes, but one can often wait 25 minutes. Then two buses arrive and skip the stop because they are late or full. Since the buses don't pass on schedule anymore, one can wait up to 35 minutes to get their bus. People have taken the habit of walking further away to take other, less frequent, buses that are on time. The same line is both under and over-utilised.
There has been talk of a subway, then a REM extension to help with this, but with CDPQ getting out of the project, we are back to square one.
Growing up in India, which was 50 years ago, bunching happened frequently, the bus behind just overtook the bus in front without stopping at the same stop, provided no one was getting off at that stop and even out the service. There was and still is a bus driver and ticket conductor.
A man barely misses his bus. "You run three minutes early!", he complains to the driver. "No", the driver replies, "I'm actually seventeen minutes late.".
I'm not sure about the rest of the world but particularly in Sydney, there are 2 types of bus drivers.
1) Schedule? What schedule? I thought this was a leisurely Sunday drive.
2) I'm on the last lap of this F1 race and I'm coming first no matter what
Seems like having the late bus pass up pick-up stops until they're on time again is the most powerful and direct solution. I think I recall Vancouver busses passing me by with a "Next Bus Pls" message on their front sign. If you can see the following bus it's not annoying to have to wait a few extra minutes. If it occurs and you can't see the next bus, and you haven't had previous experience with this, then it can be bewildering.
That might be possible on bus routes with very frequent buses, but on not so frequent routes, skipping stops may help buses recover to their schedule but that would make the people left behind even later for their destination if they are forced to wait for the following bus.
Issue with that is, busy stops where people regularly want to get on are also often stops where people want to get off! So a lot of the time the bus would likely end up needing to stop anyway. Can't just hold people already on the bus hostage! (although that has happened to me a few times on London buses)
Also a good point.@@liamness
So I guess good frequency is a desirable precondition for the skip-stop solution, and it's not always going to be effective.
An excellent video. But the points made in a graphic at 4mins 15secs need to be stressed. In places (eg most of Britain) where drivers are still expected to sell tickets, there can be 'random delays' while the passenger struggles to find the fare (or even the right app!), and/or the driver struggles to find the correct ticket on their machine.
Any bus that accepts cash fares is subject to this kind of delay. There's always Grandma counting out nickels until she either puts in the correct fare or the driver waves her through due to concern with the growing lineup behind Grandma.
Absolutely. Perhaps a way forward on this, which would also make the most of the drivers an operator has (a scarce resourse at present in the UK), would be to let the driver just drive - after all, tram-drivers don't deal with ticketing! It would also make the bus faster - which would start a whole virtuous circle of more passengers, less cars, less congestion and, as you point out, would get rid of one contributory cause of bunching.
The best solution for this is on very busy routes ,create an new express route so that people can reach downtown faster or build a subway line along the route (ofc the subway stations is not every bus stops )
This is really interesting! Thanks for the explainer on bunching, it's something that I've noticed as a rider but had very little understanding of.
Your research always impresses me.
Sometimes I've seen buses leapfrog others in the bunch.
A while back I read something about drivers being actively told how far ahead the next bus, and instructed to keep back.
There's also having schedule leeway in the turnaround point, though that works better with lower frequnecies and also shorter routes.
Ah, the short turn, something I've experienced a couple times on our wonderful German railways... Do note that for regional trains at least (and where I live), most significant delays tend to be around three to eight minutes and bunching only happens at more exceptional instances like infra failures (how often did the points fail again? lol).
The Green Line in Boston was the worst about this. You'd "stand by" on your train and Kenmore, then another train would enter the station, and you'd leave at the same time. Then two others would be stacked up behind you
When I caught the 99 at an unpopular stop going to high-school sometimes I'd be skipped 3 or 4 times. Bus drivers need to coordinate their skips. They would all point behind them like the next guy wasn't going to just skip me too hahah
Back when I was a bus commuter, pdx drivers on my high-frequency route would often roll past my stop in a vehicle heaving with passengers and make giant "GET THE NEXT ONE" gestures. The first time it happened I was annoyed but I figured it out soon enough. They'd also sometimes just switch to drop-off only and use the route display to communicate it, until things evened out again.
Was this on Line 72?
I think I should praise my transit agency, I rarely expirenced this problem. Dresden has the changing rythms of traffic lights for the Tram to fasten things up, and a app to know when the next Tram / Bus appears.
If the stations showed the actual arrival time of the following buses perhaps seeing a bus bypass a station wouldn't be too painful. Keeping people informed is key.
In many European cities the 'real time' displays at stop tell the more discerning passengers that there is 'another one behind'.
Thanks for exploring this issue, Reece. When it comes to buses, I sometimes feel that direct communication between drivers might help -- for example, the driver of bus #2 with its many empty seats could agree to leapfrog the jam-packed bus #1 to clear out the upcoming stops along the line.
10:05 the digital systems where I'm from are accurate up to 10 seconds and they change colour if you're late or too early and are usually well respected by the drivers, I've never heard a radio call of someone saying to slow down or speed up
The main issue with bunching is the longer gaps leading to full buses so longer wait times again, often to the extent that even the immediate buses are full. I’ve had to wait two hours at times to get on a bus with a supposed 15 minute frequency
You said that this happens a lot more often to buses but in my experience, trains have this problem more often because if the train in front is just a couple minutes late, the next train has to wait because there is no way to pass it, only in big train stations via a platform change, whereas with buses here if one is too late, the other one just passes it.
I remember a great joke from the BBC Radio 4 show "I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue" about this. They were doing parody diary entries from historical figures, this one from one of Joseph, husband of Mary. According to the late great Barry Cryer, Joseph wrote "Three Wise Men showed up. Isn't it bloody typical, you wait for one Wise Man to turn up, three come along at once!"
When I was a kid I could only dream of watching content related to public transit, thank you for taking the time to make it happen!
In Melbourne in my youth the standard joke: "what is green and yellow and comes in bunches", answer: trams. Especially in Swanston Street.
I live in the San Francisco Bay area and there was a route in San Francisco the #15 that would often bunch up and the drivers would do what we referred to as leapfrogging the lead vehicle would stop at the stop, and if the trailing vehicles did not have a request for people to get off they would drive on by and now the vehicle that was in the second position now becomes the vehicle in the first position and stops at the next stop to pick up passengers, and if they have anybody getting off they'll get off. In this way, the buses would actually move pretty quickly as a pack, but still annoying when you're standing there for 20 minutes and then four buses show up in a row. To your point, this route has been replaced by a tram.
I've seen buses on the same number do a "leapfrog" where the bus behind overtakes the bus in front and picks up passengers at the next stop, and then the bus that's behind which was previously in front overtakes it again and so on.
I always belive that public transport has priority over private ones so I always give way to buses, including moving to another lane if i see a bus behind me, letting them the turn accross the road even if I have the right of way. Once roadworks on a main road merged 3 lanes into one, and a queue formed for vehicles on the other side as there are now no gaps for them to turn accross the road due to the never-ending flow of condensed traffic. Seeing a bus in that queue, I stopped the whole lane to let them pass until the bus was able to turn.
In Dublin, when a few buses got bunched up, the drivers in the other buses except the first would get out and have a chat while waiting for the first bus to go ahead.
It’s a terrible solution because it just moves the bunch further back as more buses catch up. It’s also very indicative of the general Irish attitude.
The annoying part about bunching is not only bunching itself, but also people's behavior around it. I'd wait on a train, the displays show it's delayed. Great. Then an announcement over PA says the next train will be two minutes later. I can even see it, waiting to enter the station. The first one is so full, people just can't get on. I just wait, the first train leaves, the second arrives. It's half empty, to the point I easily find a sit. But no. People have to shove into the first one.
I've seen bunching happening right out of the terminal. So I think the drivers just decided to leave all at once.
could be intentional also so that there is capacity once the first bus is full and it starts skipping pickups on asymmetric routes - say rush hour in the suburbs going to the jobs down town
Large busses make the problem worse due to longer load/unload times especially if fare collection or tapping is done onboard or worse at a single (driver’s) door.
Delays come from operator shortfalls, traffic, weather, and loading/unloading disabled passengers. Equipment failures seem rare.
Operationally, I would slow down the delayed vehicle until the next one catches up, so waiting passengers can see there is no need to climb on the first (overloaded) one. Telling them the next bus is just a few minutes behind doesn’t work as they are already mad that their bus is late 😭
I have a personal vandetta against painful option 2 because Queensland Rail does this *all* the time during morning peaks. My station is in the mid-suburbs so if a citybound train from the outer suburbs is running slightly too late they'll make it run express through mine and other nearby stations to catch up. What this means in practice is that instead of there being a reliable 5-10 minute gap between trains in the morning, some mornings there will randomly be a 15-20 minute one at my station. I'm just lucky that my job doesn't enforce strict arrival times at the office or else it would be a real pain to manage.
As an asside. Bus tracking can be extremely useful in these kinds of instances. In the UK at least, certain bus operators, like stagecoach, offer bus tracking inside their app, there are times when they're not on, or maybe the bus doesn't have a tracker at all but it's fairly rare. And personally it helps me a lot, knowing if a bus is late and seeing where it exactly is.
Taxi and delivery apps all offer GPS tracking of car/order these days so I can imagine a bus app showing the busses based on location / chosen bus you are watching in the ap ETC
One of the biggest problems I see with trying to tell some drivers to slow down would be when a driver is on their last run and wants to drop his passengers off at the station and get his bus back to the depot NOW. Usually I can tell when a driver is on his last run because of how fast they end up going.
in london it's pretty common for buses to stop at a certain stop for a few minutes to "regulate the service", i.e. prevent bunching. doesn't exactly stop you seeing two 227s right behind each other all the time though.
I once saw a bus pass me by at a stop with "departures only" on its dot matrix sign and then a couple minutes behind it was another bus that picked me up, but I haven't seen it since. I've also once been on a bus in the evening and it stopped for a few minutes and the driver said we were ahead of schedule so it would be a couple minutes before we started moving again.
You can explain things like these very good! I understood it very quick 👍👍👍
In college, there was a loop service around the campus that ran every few minutes.
There was one stop on the far side of campus with a timer. The driver would set the timer for 10 minutes (or something, forget the value) when they left, and if another bus reached that stop before the timer hit 0, they had to wait.
Prevents bunching, but annoying if you're on that bus sitting at a stop for 10 minutes. The loop ran both clockwise and counter-clockwise though, so not many people were actually on the bus at that timed stop.
Just got "bunched" on Albany's "BRT" Red line as we speak. CDTA (Albany) just spent some mills building, touting, and opening their newest purple line, perhaps the least useful of the three. It's supposed to complete our brt system. It could be immediately noticed that the red line at the same time started missing runs and being chronically late and subject to bunching.
At least I won't get angry anymore when my bus drives past without stopping (I'll just know it's trying to catch-up so is skipping stops)
But bunching has one pretty big advantage. If you wait for a wee bit longer you get an empty bus/tram whatever. And as someone who got fed up with commuting in public transport because of them being too full, riding an empty line is a blessing. Especially if the bus 2 minutes previously was packed.