> They stop and wait in the station until their time arrives.
So you're suggesting… they shouldn't follow a schedule?
The bus only ever needs to wait when there are no people getting on/off the bus at multiple stops in a row (e.g. at night-time), so then those stops will be skipped. As a consequence, the bus will be a few minutes ahead of time and so at some point the driver will stop and wait to make sure the bus is still following the schedule.
Sometimes the bus also needs to stop because drivers take their mandatory break. This usually happens at the end of the line, though, before they return or go on under a different line number.
In any case: I have yet to see a public transport system as good as Berlin's. Yes, it might still take you a while to get from A to B (it is a big city after all) but which other major city in the world offers reliable 24/7 public transport with great coverage and is not completely overloaded all the time? The only thing I dislike is the price for single tickets which is between 3.00€ and 3.80€ depending on the zone. (That used to be a kebap!) IMO they should finally put an end of all the free-riding (by both Berliners and tourists alike) and introduce electronic ticket checks at every stop.
Of course they shouldn't follow a strict schedule. You either value the time or the accuracy. If you're slowing everyone down to the worst case timing, you're wasting everyone's time just to be "on schedule". The schedules were clearly artificially longer than needed, because buses were frequently waiting in stations. I'm not talking about night buses, this happened during the day and frequently.
It was very obvious to me as an outsider that the planning is wrong. When the buses are frequently waiting minutes in stations with 20 people on them, it's watching hours of human hours wasted for an artificial accuracy. Accuracy is useless, the purpose is to have good average case end to end timing. Never have I had Google maps suggesting half an hour walks in European cities with pubic transport over public transport. Just shows how bad is the management of timing. They are waiting so
frequently you might as well just walk.
Maybe it's just a cultural thing. You value how much the ticket costs and whether the timing is accurate. I value my personal time.
> Of course they shouldn't follow a strict schedule.
> Maybe it's just a cultural thing. You value how much the ticket costs and whether the timing is accurate. I value my personal time.
What an interesting clash of cultures. I don't fully understand your point though, if you can't be sure the bus arrives at 10:23 h, you have to come earlier to the station and wait, no?
There's usually an app that tells you in real time when the bus will arrive, including possible congestion. When it's minutes away it's never early so it's not a problem. The bus is almost never early from the scheduled time because it's usually the minimum time. So the bus might be late, but at least it's not standing idly while you're already in it, intentionally wasting everyone's time.
There's also a stop button to make sure the bus doesn't waste everyone's time stopping in stations nobody wants. Which is pretty pointless if we're now wasting the time earned by standing idle.
If I want accuracy, it's my responsibility to go ahead of time and pad my margins. Not the buses' job. It seems selfish to me to waste everyone's time for people who need accuracy, it's their responsibility to waste their own time getting better margins.
So you think if a train driver happens to show up 30minutes earlier at the train station, a long distance train should just depart earlier, leaving all the passengers and people with connections stranded?
Your comments are fascinating. Completely nonsense, but fascinating.
Do you have reading comprehension problems? It's not about when the driver arrives, it's about not standing intentionally with passengers wasting their time by design, in the middle of the road. I feel like I'm getting downvoted by people with reading comprehension level of bots.
It's better to have an optimistic schedule that sometimes gets late than a pessimistic schedule that always wastes everyone's time making pubic transport extremely slow in all circumstances.
It's not about the driver. It's about the passengers. It's about not stopping idly during your route with people on the bus. Buses aren't trains, they usually don't need to stop at all stations and the difference between stopping in all stations and not doing it is huge.
If your train schedule is so bad that a train, which has no traffic at all, can come 30 minutes early from schedule, then it could always do that and you're planning something wrong.
> it's about not standing intentionally with passengers wasting their time by design
If you've ever taken a train, you could know that they might arrive on the track even hours before their departure, and passengers who are early are often welcome board and get settled.
Now we have people inside that are just waiting instead of travelling… Exactly the situation you have been describing.
> I feel like I'm getting downvoted by people with reading comprehension level of bots.
No. The problem lies with the writer, not the readers.
> can come 30 minutes early from schedule
I'm curious to know where this number is coming. For city transport we are talking about 2-3 minutes.
There's usually an app that tells you in real time when the bus will arrive
there is now, but that wasn't always the case. taking advantage of that requires a big change for everyone. for decades people expected busses and trains to be on a schedule, and the worst thing for everyone was leaving ahead of schedule. that simply must never happen.
and even with an app, it's completely useless to know that the next bus is in 25 minutes when i transfer from another bus that arrived on time. only a schedule that makes sure that the timing of the busses is suitable for a transfer can avoid that. or the second bus simply has to wait for the first bus to arrive. a schedule is easier.
what if, hear me out, instead of not following schedule, so that people have no idea when to go to the station and making transport unreliable, ther'll be more busses, so that each will wait less on each station, so people would get both reliability and speed. like in Zurich or other big swiss cities...
London has two types of schedule for buses and metro trains.
On the most frequest services, the timetable says something like "every 6-8 minutes". Otherwise, it gives the exact time. With the former, the bus isn't going to wait if it's 'early', and waiting 1 minute vs. 5 isn't going to make much difference to your journey.
Since even the most frequent services aren't so frequent overnight, you often see a mix.
> So you're suggesting… they shouldn't follow a schedule?
This is the Göteborg way. Want to take a tram and go there 5 minutes earlier? Ah, there was no traffic and you see the tram already leaving anyway. Now enjoy waiting 20 minutes for the next in freezing temperature and strong winds.
> and introduce electronic ticket checks at every stop
Copenhagen does this on bus. Basically every stop suddenly takes 2x as long at the very least.
Copenhagen (well, Denmark) has two NFC card (Rejsekort) readers at the front of every bus, with more at other doors on busier routes (ending A or C). People with commuter passes can vaguely wave them towards the driver as they board, or generally not bother.
If you want to be infuriated by how slow things can be, try a bus in Malmö.
Malmö (I assume Skåne) has a 2D-barcode-based system, where everyone has to validate their ticket on the barcode reader when they board a bus. This is about as reliable as you'd expect, including the usual fiddling with brightness settings etc. They used to have an NFC card system, but for some reason discontinued it.
[But I think the GP meant a system with ticket barriers on the metro/trains, like London, Paris, Rome and Madrid.]
> Copenhagen (well, Denmark) has two NFC card (Rejsekort) readers at the front of every bus, with more at other doors on busier routes
As an occasional visitor with a day pass, the experience is just the driver yelling at me, and me having to take my gloves out, get the thing and show it to the driver.
> They used to have an NFC card system, but for some reason discontinued it.
Because app is cheaper and they can gather data to sell it or just their own tracking.
Last time I was in malmö, I remember being on a large square trying to get a bus to go to our hotel. And there were like 15 different lanes named with unsorted letters, and by the time we'd found the lane we'd miss the bus. Repeat this like 4 times.
I mean, yes? It must be infuriating to see a bus artificially stopping just to get the exact schedule. Of course the starting from the first station it should leave on time, but on intermediate stations I find it pretty ok to be a couple of minutes off.
Great. So now you miss the bus when you arrive at the stop on time and have to wait for the next one.
(Matters less when the next one arrives a couple of minutes later of course.)
Route planning in congested cities is a complex problem and following a schedule as close as possible is one of the ways to ensure you can do any kind of route planning involving a change of line.
Would buses be arriving 20 minutes earlier otherwise? I'd very much rather arrive at the station a little earlier than knowing I could already be at my destination if it weren't for these artificial punctuality stops.
So you're suggesting… they shouldn't follow a schedule?
The bus only ever needs to wait when there are no people getting on/off the bus at multiple stops in a row (e.g. at night-time), so then those stops will be skipped. As a consequence, the bus will be a few minutes ahead of time and so at some point the driver will stop and wait to make sure the bus is still following the schedule.
Sometimes the bus also needs to stop because drivers take their mandatory break. This usually happens at the end of the line, though, before they return or go on under a different line number.
In any case: I have yet to see a public transport system as good as Berlin's. Yes, it might still take you a while to get from A to B (it is a big city after all) but which other major city in the world offers reliable 24/7 public transport with great coverage and is not completely overloaded all the time? The only thing I dislike is the price for single tickets which is between 3.00€ and 3.80€ depending on the zone. (That used to be a kebap!) IMO they should finally put an end of all the free-riding (by both Berliners and tourists alike) and introduce electronic ticket checks at every stop.