Synchronising Bus Bunching to the Spikes in Service Demand Reduces Commuters’ Waiting Time

Figure 2

Average waiting time for two buses in the three configurations described in Sections 2 and 3. The two upper plots represent a case of low demand from the spike bus stop while the two lower plots represent high demand . The plots on the left assume unlimited capacity of the buses, and the plots on the right explicitly limit the capacity of buses at while boarding passengers from the spike bus stop. As discussed in Section 4, synchronised bunched buses (configuration B) outperform perfectly staggered buses (configuration C) when the demand of the spike bus stop is high as compared with the regular bus stop. Limiting capacity further increases the advantage of bunched buses. For this example, is set to a value of 100 time units and .