Wait or walk...

Ever wonder whether you should wait for that bus to arrive or walk one stop further down the line?  Well, some mathematicians have and they  worked out the answer.  Too bad they didn't talk to Stephen Dubner first.  I think he's got it right, if anything, walking back one stop makes the most sense.  It raises the probability of getting on a bus at a very crowded stop and/or at rush hour and raises the probability of getting a good seat, or any seat for that matter. 

I think this is a bigger issue in more urban areas where buses are more crowded in general and the stops are closer together.  When I lived in Toronto I'd often do this bus stop leapfrog.  Of course there, there are more overlapping routes so going forward or back one stop may increase the number of possible buses (or streetcars where they exist) you might hop on.

Of course, there's nothing worse (OK, maybe some things are worse...) than getting caught between stops and watching your bus roll by as you look on forlornly or break into a sprint in a futile attempt to catch it.

Perhaps this is a bigger issue around here for we bus/bike riders due to the real scarcity of bus rack space (2 per bus generally on Pierce T.).  Again, as a grad student in Santa Cruz (OK, so I'm getting carried away with the links, its just such an amazing place), I often would see several fellow bikers who had arrived ahead of me at a stop and I (self interested economist that I am) would pedal on to try and grab that bike rack spot a stop before.  I've never seen this happen but the game theorist in me wonders what might happen if two (or three) cyclists were to each attempt this strategy (in some sense its like the centipede game), competitively pedaling further and further up the route away from their destination.

Garrett, Faculty