Passionately Promoting A More Perfect World

@dataandphilosophy said:

https://pedestrianobservations.com/2017/06/28/modeling-jitney-bus-competition/ An argument for socialist bus systems you might be interested in, if you haven’t seen it yet.

I think the main thing that bugs me about the argument is that it assumes riders will just get onto whichever bus arrives first, which is directly contradictory to my experience of private bus systems with high-volume routes. Enough so that I’m not really sure what they’re basing the assumption on.

The third assumption is that marginal riders take whichever route they see first.

My experience of a private bus system with a lot of variety in the buses was that people passed on buses they didn’t like and got into buses they did like. I even had a friend whose preferences were so weird that he would only ride a bus if it was painted red. He passed on most of the buses that arrived at his stop after school, but he still rarely had to wait more than 15 minutes.

However, the preferences people use for which bus to ride usually don’t map quite that way. Most often it’s social. The bus’s outer artwork announces its subcultural affiliation (and, implicitly, what music it plays), and this determines who wants to ride it, which in turn means people with a shared subculture often ride the bus together. Thus, you can choose to get on the Catholic bus, the Protestant bus, the Dancehall bus, the Calypso bus, the Hip Hop bus, etc.

How sensitive people are to the subcultural cues versus the timing is almost entirely a function of route volume, though. When getting on the bus at the main transit hub in the capital, the choice is almost entirely based on subculture. If all the buses are less than a minute behind each other, why wouldn’t you optimise for sharing the ride with people who share your tastes and values? At the bus stop outside my college, where the lag was closer to 3 minutes, maybe two thirds of people passed on the first bus they saw due to whatever bus preferences they might have. (I didn’t ask them individually; just eyeballed what fraction got onto each bus when the bus didn’t fill up.)

Meanwhile, on a low-volume rural route, I’d expect around three quarters of people to take the first bus that shows up. The folks most likely to pass are the elderly religious people who have all the time in the world and would wait for the grave rather than ride with teenage hip hop fans.

So, on a low-volume route, I would expect the article’s claims about schedule competition to hold true. In that case, competing on speed probably is what’s most valuable. This fits with my observation that the buses on rural routes drive the fastest. On the other hand, if the route is high volume, I’d expect market segmentation where sub-cultural concerns dominate. In much the same way that clothes cost so little today that all that matters is what your clothes mean.

OTOH, maybe I’m wrong about what would happen in the US. I’ve already noticed that I constantly over predict the social-focus of Americans, as I’m from a place with a much greater social focus. Maybe Americans don’t care enough about subcultures for that to determine their bus-taking habits? Or maybe there’d never be a sufficient number of buses on a route for the segmentation to kick in?

Or maybe American subcultures are the wrong size (too small to devote entire buses to or too large for a small number of buses to completely capture the market on a given route)? Or maybe they just care so much about timing that they wouldn’t wait two minutes for a bus with a more congenial social environment? As someone who’s often harassed on public transit, I would wait an hour if it got me a bus from a trans-friendly subculture.

But my best guess would still be that there’d end up being Red Tribe country music buses, and Blue Tribe indie music buses, and black hip hop buses, and nerd buses playing video game soundtracks and anime themes, and buses with music in Spanish or Mandarin or Haitian Creole.