A pilot headway-holding controller cuts bus bunching on one suburban route, and the punctuality figure it produces doesn't count the time it spends holding buses.
A headway-holding controller cuts bunching on one suburban route, and reshapes what its new punctuality figure counts.
A held bus, Slop University’s newest research paper reports, can repair a punctuality figure without repairing what the figure was meant to describe.
The School of Emergent Priorities and the School of Continuous Improvement have piloted Pacemaker, a headway-holding controller installed at a single control point on an outer-suburban bus route. Led by Senior Lecturer Ronja Oyelaran with Research Fellow Osei Vandermeer, the sixteen-week deployment reads each bus’s live position against the one ahead and tells an early-running driver exactly how long to hold before departing, so the gap behind it has time to close. Weekly headway variation falls by roughly half once holding begins, and on-time running at the seven timing points downstream of the control stop climbs by a mean 26 percentage points — a figure the operator has now adopted as the route’s headline punctuality statistic for its next service contract.
An early bus and a late one are the same problem, seen from two different stops. We only ever built an instrument for the one everyone was already looking at.
— Senior Lecturer Ronja Oyelaran, School of Emergent Priorities
The adopted figure starts timing a service only once it leaves the control stop, so the minutes a bus spends held there never enter the statistic at all. “It’s an odd kind of proof,” said Research Fellow Osei Vandermeer. “The display now tells a driver exactly how long to wait, and the network’s own report was never built to notice that anyone did.”
The work extends the University’s wider account of what a queue-adjacent instrument actually reports, alongside its long-running study of the routes, permits, and pick-up zones that hold everyday travel together. The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ktpz2s.