January 28, 2008
Should I Stay Or Should I Go?
It's one of the crapshoots of the daily commute. When you get to your bus stop with no bus or streetcar in sight, should you walk to the next stop and hope the bus catches up or just stay put and wait? According to the New Scientist, Harvard mathematician Scott Kominers has dedicated lighthearted academic study to this very question.
His solution? "When both options seem reasonably attractive," he says, you should be lazy and wait, no matter how frustrating. The bus or streetcar will eventually come—in Toronto, it'll likely be followed by a convoy of empty streetcars, too—and it'll be less waiting is less frustrating than waiting a little while, then giving up, only to see a bus go whizzing by. And, it'll save you the frustration of walking while constantly glancing back, worried you'll be caught between stops.
Detailed deconstruction of the study has to be left to a mathematics or statistics whiz, but the desirability of Kominers's solution falls on a couple of real-world points. Is walking more pleasant than standing still? Will it keep you warm on a cold day? Or will waiting under a bus shelter keep you dry in a downpour? Is your destination only a couple blocks away? Finally, if you walk, are the route's sight-lines clear enough to see a bus far enough in the distance to reach a stop in time? Even Kominers admits his formula breaks down in extreme cases, such as "when the time interval between buses is longer than an hour...and your destination is only a kilometre away."
Of course, you don't need to be studying mathematics to know all this. Anyone who relies on TTC surface routes has endured the frustrations of the walk-or-wait dilemma (although in the TTC's defence, things are said to be improving on some of the most notorious routes). We're able to tell from the number of people waiting at our usual stop whether we've just missed a bus, if one is likely to come soon, or if there's obviously a breakdown or interruption somewhere up the line. We've each developed our own particular intuitions for the walk-or-wait decision on the routes we use most frequently. We work out these decisions every day without the help of pocket calculators, but it's still heartening to think that there's a crack team of scientists somewhere busy working on the really important riddles of everyday life.
Photo by David Topping.
|
I usually walk. I don't like standing around waiting, and with the TTC (Queen Street car, especially) that's a long time to be wasting. I stop at each stop and look back to see if a street car is coming though.
This wouldn't be a problem if they had "next bus" signs at stops. (hint, hint).
Problem is, if you're using a transfer and you don't feel like hanging around like a jackass, you can't just walk to the next stop. The TTC insists you use it at the first available point of transfer.
A driver actually nailed me on this once, going east on Queen. I dug in my pocket for change and barely had enough to make the $2.75 "owed." Oh, and this was roughly two hours before that TTC strike when drivers were threatening to let people get on for free.
I...kind of understood the whole spitting on/attacking drivers thing at that moment. :(
i've been having a particularly hard time with the bathurst blue night bus. in the past few months, i've ended up walking all the way to st. clair and bathurst at 3 in the morning more than once—after waiting for 20 or 30 minutes—from as far south as adelaide, never to even have one pass me on my nearly hour long trek up the street. although the walking is good, and generally i don't it mind that much, sometimes i just want to get home for fuck's sakes!
I'm a student at U of T and sometimes I take the 94 bus on Harbord & St George to the Yonge & Wellesley intersection. It's only a 20 min walk but on cold, windy days it can be a drag. But if there's no bus in sight, I always walk since 99% of the time I don't even need to look back. I always make it to Yonge street before the bus catches up...
I'm a walker. The 'scientist' does not take into account the benefits (cardiovascular, stress-reduction, general health, etc.) of walking only of time to catch a bus.
Although, the TTC transfer system also makes people lazy because you can only use it at certain points.
It would be better if they had a system, like in Vancouver, where it is based on time and/or travel zones.