Bus Bunching

Standing at a bus stop and waiting for a half-hour only to see three buses arrive together (bunched) is one of the most frustrating experiences for a public transit customer. Bus bunching creates gaps in service and highlights inefficient use of resources.

Civic Consulting has led a long-term effort with the CTA to eliminate bus bunching and improve bus service quality.

The “bus bunching” work involves an agency-wide performance improvement effort targeting the routes, times and locations causing the biggest disruptions in service and developing innovative solutions to address the problem.

As a result, as of March 2009 the number of “big gaps” in service had decreased by more than 50% across the bus system, and ridership on routes with the most improved service had grown at four times the rate of the other routes (12% vs 3%).  See "Eliminating Bus Bunching - Building a process, information source, and tool box for improving service" (PDF).

From a customer standpoint, these improvements translate to one minute and 15 seconds saved in waiting time for every ride, or nearly 20,000 fewer hours of waiting time every day.

Tom McKone discusses the Bus Bunching project:

Brian Fabes discusses Civic Consulting's work with the CTA: