Anything would be better than what we have. When I studied NextBus predictions for the SF Muni 1-California line I found that the predicted arrival time was not even correlated with the actual arrival time. If they had taken all the radios and computers out of the system and just showed a random number as the minutes to arrival that would have been every bit as good as NextBus.
Bold of you to assume they hadn't already done that.
Remember, lowest bidder wins the contract.
The N Judah is usually on time or a little early, except going outbound between 6:30pm and 7:30pm. If you’re waiting for the F, you should mentally add 2 minutes to whatever time you see. The J Church going downtown becomes increasingly late the closer to downtown it actually gets (partly because it often loses the signal lottery with the N Judah since it gets stalled out at the Market Street intersection even if it was scheduled to go in ahead of time). When the L trains were running, it would always seem to depart from the Zoo-side terminus on time if you were waiting there, but if you were waiting up the street on Taraval, you could reliably add 5 to 10 minutes to your wait time.
Also at the Embarcadero, there can never be two working upwards escalators going from the MUNI platform to the eastern exits at the same time. It simply cannot happen. If one gets fixed, the other will break, even if it was just fixed a few days ago.
edit: interesting post with a different ending than I imagined.
Been thinking about using some statistical methods to give me some better estimates of the busses I take to work. Like "given that it's $today, which is a Tuesday, it's 17:30, and the display says the bus is 7 minutes delayed, how long til it will actually come?