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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.