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

Figure 3

Comparison of the average waiting time for the three configurations as a function of the demand at the spike bus stop and the capacity . The orange triangles represent the set of parameters where synchronised bunched buses have the lowest average waiting time, while the green “x” symbols indicate where perfectly staggered buses have the lowest average waiting time among the three configurations. Bunched buses (case A) are never the best performers for the parameters explored. The three plots show how increasing the number of buses from 2 to 3 to 4 (from left to right) tends to favour the staggered bus configuration. Points in the region of high and low are missing, since in that regime more than two revolutions are needed to pick up all the passengers at the spike bus stop. This region is defined by . For this example, is set to a value of 100 time units and while is fixed at 0.1.