Re:The Waiting Time Paradox, Or, Why Is My Bus Always Late?
by pieguy on Sunday October 28, 2018 @02:37PM
(#18322097)
In statistics, "average" often means "expected value". No time frame is specified (although you could consider it an infinite time frame). With a small sample size your actual average might not be 10 minutes, but as your sample size grows, it will tend toward 10 minutes.
Re:The Waiting Time Paradox, Or, Why Is My Bus Always Late?
by twtw on Sunday October 28, 2018 @02:58PM
(#18322268)
> it will tend toward 10 minutes
If you are talking about spherical-cow style poisson buses, yeah (that's what the author means by "reasonable assumptions). But as the author concludes, bus arrival times are not well modeled by a poisson process.
This is very ambiguous. Unless he gives a time frame the numbers do not make sense. Average in a week? Average in a year? This is not how it works in real life.
And I cannot accept his premise. My experience tells me that, in New York, when I used to take a bus to work, sometimes the bus was coming as I was walking to the stop; sometimes I would wait a long time. Sometimes not very long. There was no observable bias.