BUS BUNCHING

In 1983, while I was director of scheduling for the Southern California Rapid Transit District, I wrote a paper "Bus Line Regulation", based on an experiment we conducted in controlling the bunching of a heavy line.

The genesis of the idea of having checkers exert subtle control over line operation was the observation of the supervisors of the checkers, that whenever checkers checked (collected data) a bus line because of reported operation problems, the problems seemed to disappear. While we had the concurrence of union representatives to conduct the experiment, it was otherwise unauthorized.

Although submitted twice to the Transportation Research Board, it was not accepted. It is "published" here for the first time.

Download paper as PDF file (231KB).