Wednesday, June 03, 2015

Public Transit at 57789

I took the bus to work this morning (well, drove to a train station where I took the bus and from the bus I took the metro (what our subway is called here)) and managed to get to the bus stop at the biggest time gap and so had to wait the longest.

There are four buses that all take me to the metro from this stop, they are the 211, 405, 411 and 425.

The stop times at this stop (57789) are as follows:
211: 7h04,7h24,7h50,8h18
405: 7h09,7h29,7h51,8h12
411: 7h19,7h51,8h18
425: 7h12,7h32,7h55,8h15

If you put them in order of time, it looks like this:

7h04,7h09,7h12,7h19,7h24,7h29,7h32,7h50,7h51,7h55,8h12,8h15,8h18
    5    3    7    5    5    4    18   1    4    17   3    3
You can see that between 7h32 and 7h50 there is an 18 minute gap where no bus will come, and another 17 minute gap half an hour later, but outside of those times there is a bus every 3 to 5 minutes with one outlier at 7. This morning I managed to arrive at the bus stop very soon after the 7h32 425 bus passed, so I had to wait until 7h51 for the 411 (the 7h50 211 came in just behind the 411). If I arrive at the bus stop any time between 7h00 and 7h32 I'd catch a bus without hardly having to wait.

Now if only I can get my kids out of the house in such a time that I can get to this bus stop in that window, that would be the icing on the transit cake.

4 comments:

Debstar said...

Hahaha Good luck with that. I took hubby on a train trip to Brisbane yesterday. He hated it and complained quite a lot. I chatted to a few people and he told me I was one of those people who are very annoying. It passes the time plus one man even gave me his newspaper to read, possibly to shut me up.

Phil Plasma said...

In our commuter trains they have put signs up on the upper level of the passenger rail cars that it is the 'quiet zone' where conversations are to be kept low, mobile phones are to be on vibrate and the music that people play on ear buds or ear phones should not be so loud as to be heard by fellow passengers.

I see this being respected mostly, though not 100%.

Generally speaking I see the commute time as a personal time, time for me to read, to listen to music or to just vegetate. If I do not have to speak with anyone for that half hour train ride, all the better.

meshie said...

that seems like a unfriendly user experience for commuters.

the waiting is certainly one of the most unnerving parts of the transit experience for me. I'm spoiled because my commute is relatively short, and because of where I live, there are multiple options if one of the routes is delayed. there are still terrible transit days, however, especially going home from work, when the streetcars are usually quite overfull (which is another of the most unnerving parts of the experience for me).

There are no quiet zones on the public transit network here (or none that I'm aware of). That would be quite welcome to me, too.

Debstar said...

Remind me NEVER to speak to you two when I'm on a train!