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.
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.
> 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 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.
Your comments are fascinating. Completely nonsense, but fascinating.
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.
No, I don't.
> 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.
Padding actually makes those timings reliable.
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.
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.
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.]
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.
Exactly. Berlin is certainly not Göteborg but its long and nasty winters are notorious nonetheless.
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.
London bus 14, for example: https://tfl.gov.uk/bus/timetable/14/?fromId=490011285E2&dire...
Incidentally, at times I noticed the same slow pace of Berlin transport.
They stop and wait in the station until their time arrives. That's just incredibly dumb planning. I get that the point is to be more "reliable" and "on time" but what's the point of being accurate if you're so slow?! At some points Google maps suggested we walk half an hour instead of taking the bus because the bus was slower.
It takes some really funny priorities to reach this point. I haven't seen anything similar anywhere else, a bus stopping and waiting with people inside. And it wasn't something rare, it seemed to happen pretty frequently.
It seemed like they are artificially padding the accuracy metric by actively slowing the buses. Their schedule is far slower than their average pace, and then they slow down everything. You get that the worst case timing is now your average timing but "accuracy" increased. That's Goodhart law in full effect.