Reddit Reddit reviews Why Do Buses Come in Threes? The Hidden Mathematics of Everyday Life

We found 6 Reddit comments about Why Do Buses Come in Threes? The Hidden Mathematics of Everyday Life. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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6 Reddit comments about Why Do Buses Come in Threes? The Hidden Mathematics of Everyday Life:

u/cdninbuffalo · 6 pointsr/chicago

> There is no way in hell bus crunching should be a problem these days.

Buses "bunching" is a widely-known statistical problem. There's even a book with the title "Why Buses Come in 3" [0]. The CTA already collects GPS data (CTA buses have GPSes--one can track where buses are in real-time with the Transit iOS App. I use it and it's mostly accurate on my routes, where the GPS has line-of-sight -- which isn't always the case in the Loop).

One of the major causes of the bunching phenomenon is people taking too long to board, or people trying to board an already full bus [1].

People need to either board quickly, or wait for the next bus if the current one is full (to avoid delaying it further). Now, if we can figure out how to incentivize people to do this naturally, we would have mitigated one source of stochasticity, which in turn makes the system dynamics more tractable and predictable. Good drivers already enforce this (at the expense of coming across as being pushy).

The other big source of stochasticity is traffic, and Google Maps already does a good job of predicting ETA in real time in current traffic (plus Google collects real-time traffic data from other Google Maps users on the road).

Other solutions that I've seen in other cities is to have the driver wait a couple of minutes at certain reset points when they are running ahead of schedule. Unfortunately, this is hard to do on a busy artery in Chicago at rush hour.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Buses-Threes-Hidden-Mathematics-Everyday/dp/0471379077

[1] http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/The-312/July-2013/Chicagos-Worst-Buses-for-Bunching-and-Why-It-Happens/

u/hiding_in_the_corner · 5 pointsr/philadelphia
u/flibit · 3 pointsr/math

Not really teaching resources, but maybe good for general interest:

Books:

u/DigitalBison · 3 pointsr/Seattle

In fact, there's literally a book about it called Why Do Buses Come in Threes?.