Bus "racing" in service

[joieman]

I wonder, is there anyone else who enjoys watching the bus you're on "racing" against another bus when they bunch up?

Last Friday evening, I took the 127 from Leicester to Loughborough; two buses turned up: the one in front being a late-running double-decker and the one behind a single-decker. Inevitably, the saloon passed when I boarded the decker; however, we passed the saloon just after Belgrave Circle and remained ahead until both buses stopped after Red Hill Circle, whereupon the single-decker remained ahead of us for the remainder of my journey despite being supposed to run after the double-decker.

During this journey, I began to think that the capacity of the buses would have an impact on how fast the buses ran, hypothesising that the double-decker would be at a disadvantage, because being bigger would mean more passengers alighting, thus neutralising the effect of the bus in front taking all the new passengers.

In practice, it was even worse: at one point, I looked through the rear window of the single-decker and noticed how rammed it was. This meant that the single-decker, instead of hoovering up all the waiting passengers while running ahead of the double-decker, was actually leaving passengers behind for the decker to take, putting the latter at a further disadvantage.

I will admit, though, I enjoyed looking at it from a mathematical/scientific perspective.

 

[TR673]

Funnily enough only yesterday I was on a Nottingham City Transport bus, where the timetables had been thrown out the window by horrendous city centre traffic. NCT buses can seem painfully slow at times so when a driver's in a hurry it's very noticeable, and this one certainly got a shift on. Slightly negating the speed were the higher stop dwell times, because nobody dared stand and walk to the door while the bus was still moving!

Only when I alighted did I see that there was another bus on the same route about ten seconds behind, and our driver must've been determined to stay ahead of it.


Back when Yourbus used to run in Nottingham, competing with TrentBarton and NCT on duplicate routes, they'd sometimes drive quick to try and overtake buses from rival operators.

 

[Qwerty133]

At least in the example in the OP the buses were on the same route and heading to the same destination. The bigger issue that can occur is where the front bus is on route X and running late meaning that it is picking up passengers who were intending to catch the following bus on route Y (a route that runs along the same corridor as X but terminates somewhere along the way before reaching the final destination) which causes it to reach capacity and have to leave people behind including some of those whose destination is not served by route Y. This can lead to the situation where passengers are not only delayed by the late running but are then unable to board the late running bus (which would have had ample capacity if it was on time) and are further delayed having to wait for the next bus on route X and hoping that the same situation doesn’t occur for the following service (whilst other passengers going to places served by route Y get a virtually empty and on time bus to their destination).

 

[joieman]

At least in the example in the OP the buses were on the same route and heading to the same destination. The bigger issue that can occur is where the front bus is on route X and running late meaning that it is picking up passengers who were intending to catch the following bus on route Y (a route that runs along the same corridor as X but terminates somewhere along the way before reaching the final destination) which causes it to reach capacity and have to leave people behind including some of those whose destination is not served by route Y. This can lead to the situation where passengers are not only delayed by the late running but are then unable to board the late running bus (which would have had ample capacity if it was on time) and are further delayed having to wait for the next bus on route X and hoping that the same situation doesn’t occur for the following service (whilst other passengers going to places served by route Y get a virtually empty and on time bus to their destination).

Another interesting analysis and an infuriating situation for anyone involved in such an unfortunate situation!