A self-coördinating bus route to resist bus bunching

The primary challenge for an urban bus system is to maintain constant headways between successive buses. Most bus systems try to achieve this by adherence to a schedule; but this is undermined by the tendency of headways to collapse, so that buses travel in bunches. To counter this, we propose a new method of coördinating buses. Our method abandons the idea of a schedule and even any a priori target headway. Under our scheme headways are dynamically self-equalizing and the natural headway of the system tends to emerge spontaneously. Headways also become self-correcting in that after disturbances they reëqualize without intervention by management or even awareness of the drivers.We report on a successful implementation to control a bus route in Atlanta.

► We introduce a new means of controlling headways in an urban bus system. ► Under our scheme buses become “self-coordinating”. ► Buses will spontaneously space themselves equally around a route. ► Our scheme is simple and therefore could be widely deployed. ► We report on an experiment with a bus system in Atlanta.