Many subway systems have displays showing that the next train is right behind the current one, and yet many people still insist on getting on the current overcrowded one.

Certainly with buses people have been burned where they are told that another bus will be along in 2 minutes only for that to evaporate and the next bus actually takes 15+ minutes. If that happens to you then you'll squeeze onto the first bus you can physically fit.

It takes quite a long period of good service to undo one bad interaction.

Which makes sense, as the next one may be equally or more overcrowded. In a busy urban area, it may be hours before an uncrowded train arrives.

I'd argue that that's not bunching, it's the entire system being overloaded. A characteristic of bunching is that you have a pair of vehicles which together carry an average manageable load of passengers, but that load is unevenly distributed between them.

Perhaps they should offer a discount for boarding the next train or a price increase for boarding the overcrowded one or even both?

Too difficult to implement - crowds on a busy subway platform are very different from boarding planes at an airport.

The displays are gradually less important because a growing fraction of the population are already carrying a display with wireless networking, on a personal device the UI can show you your exact route and where the bus you need is now etc.

These could still be smarter, I remember a year or two ago stood at a bus stop, watching the position indicator for a bus I wanted to catch and realising as it in real life appeared at the next junction - it was diverted away from my stop, one of the icons I'd been ignoring was a deviations from normal route, it's often set [road construction work] but that week the diversion avoided the stop I was stood at. That bus goes in long loops so I caught it about a quarter mile away after a breathless run, but a smarter app could say

"Hey, you seem to be waiting for the U6H, at the Broadway stop, and it's not going to that stop. Walk this way for a few minutes to reach a temporary stop at which today's U6H will pick you up instead."

> The displays are gradually less important because a growing fraction of the population are already carrying a display with wireless networking, on a personal device the UI can show you your exact route and where the bus you need is now etc.

That is not my experience at all. I use busses every day and I always use the posted times and don't want to look for it on my phone. There are a handful of bus stops on my common routes without displays and I always hate it.

I'm not sure there is a critical mass of people actually looking at the apps for real-time departure information, at least not in my city (Vienna Austria).

Why not both? A QR code with a link to the same content as it would've been shown on a display would work quite well and provide redundancy in case of display hardware malfunctions.

This is what the Berlin system does.

I lived in a city with this once, and beyond the novelty factor of the first few weeks after I found the app, I stopped using it. Looking up routes on your daily commute is just too much friction. The display at the station/stop is by far the best indicator, you can see at a glance how long you have to wait when you get to the stop.

Let's put even more things on a device which is extremely addictive to many.

I love my local region e-ink screens which just show me the info without wasting too much energy.

The displays aren't that important for me. But for visitors to the city, who haven't installed the bus tracker app, they're still very useful.

(Also, signal is terrible throughout lots of central Edinburgh. I can be at a bus stop just off Princes Street and get nothing at all.)

There shouldn't need to be separate apps. I like Edinburgh, only been there twice and both times as a tourist but I don't think "Wow, a separate Edinburgh bus app" would have been a boon, whereas "Oh, my bus app just works here" would make sense.

At one point Edinburgh's bus operator was part of the same legal entity as the company which provided some bus services in my city, though that is no longer true. London has it right, no tourists and almost no locals care about the bus companies. All the buses are painted the same colour, all of them work the same way, who cares which company operates the bus or why?

You can get bus times from Google Maps. But almost nobody seems to know that.

A standard "non-profit" bus app that all bus companies could use would probably be very useful.

Isn't Google just giving you timetables?

That's not useless but it's no substitute for real time information. Seeing "Your bus is six minutes away" is reassuring in a way that "Well, the bus isn't scheduled for another minute, and maybe it's running late" is not.

In that "Oops, it's diverted" case which annoyed me, my bus was, from that point of view, genuinely getting closer, I could see it on the map. And then I realised, with growing horror, that it's on a road which won't pass me. Maybe that's a glitch? Then I saw the bus itself, in the real world, too late it's actually not coming here.

There's both: GTFS is a standard for the regular schedule, and GTFS-RT is a standard for realtime information.

Link: https://gtfs.org/documentation/realtime/reference/