Post by Steven Dale
A long time ago we asked the question When is a Minute, Not A Minute? In that post we went into how one’s perception of travel time is relative to how they’re actually travelling. As we note in that post, the Transportation Research Board states that a minute of time waiting for a transit vehicle is equivalent to 2.1 minutes of in-vehicle time. This figure increases to 2.5 minutes at transfer points.
This suggests some very interesting things about how wait times have an impact on transit ridership and how we might be able to play with them to increase ridership.
That stats always rolling around in the back of my head, and I’ve recently been playing with a similar idea for the last couple of weeks and I wanted to get our readers’ reactions and comments to it before I put together a “final” version. Remember, this is very rough and preliminary:
The basic idea here is that the time we’re willing to wait for any given transit vehicle is dependent upon the time we’re likely to spend travelling a given distance on that vehicle. The longer (further?) we’re going to travel by that mode, the longer we’re willing to wait.
While by no means mathematically precise, I think it’s anecdotally and intuitively correct: We’re willing to spend 3 hours waiting at an airport for our plane to travel literally thousands of kilometres, but we’re only willing to wait a few minutes for a bus to take us a few klicks to a subway station.
There are, I suspect, some large implications for this, but I’d rather save those until I get some reactions, corrections and ideas from everyone else.
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