The bus rider’s dilemma: solved!
January 31, 2008 by ScandiIt’s freezing and an icy wind blows down Washington Street, and some of that fine Boston snow/rain is spattering down. I’m waiting across the street from my house for the aptly named 86 bus. It runs from Sullivan Square all the way down into regions of Boston I never intend to visit and back, and it is notoriously off-schedule.
Just a block and a half up, Washington Street turns into Kirkland, Somerville turns into Cambridge, and everything suddenly looks less dreary and more collegiate, tree-lined. At this intersection stand the lovely Wine and Cheese Cask; the fabulous Dali restaurant, whose decorative wrought-iron gate is often, inexplicably, studded with masses of flowers; and best of all, Toscanini and Sons, where one can get the famous ice cream but, more importantly, where the staff are super-friendly and the coffee and sandwiches are dreamy–and the tables are big enough to spread out your stuff on for serious dreaming and scheming.
So: in just a block and a half, we travel from charming but garbage-strewn residential streets to bustling mini-square with nice people and flowers. Who wouldn’t walk that distance? Maybe I’d get where I’m going sooner. And in any case, waiting in the cold is much less painful when the environs are nice.
Yet, for a girl waiting for the 86, to do so can be disastrous. How many times have I looked down the street, craning my neck to see around the curve over the bridge toward Union Square, and wondered: Can I make it? Should I go? Will it be faster? It’s the people’s calculus, and sometimes the people are right, and sometimes they have to run for it, on icy streets with bag bouncing undignifiedly, and sometimes even so they do not catch the bus which has appeared like a ghost ship around the corner, suddenly real, unforgiving, gone.
And sometimes they get to the next bus stop, about a mile from their destination, and it begins all over again: do I walk on there? Do I wait?
It’s a terrible decision, and I am faced with it nearly every day. In all my time in Boston, I never quite figured out which was the best option.
Now, it seems, a team of mathematicians has done so. And the answer is: Don’t even think about walking. Despite the alluring intersection of Kirkland and Beacon, which beckons from up the street, if you would ride the 86, stay put and bear that wintry mix.
Justin G. Chen, Scott D. Kominers, and Robert W. Sinnott, in a recreational mathematics note posted here, have used a hypothetical situation similar to–but not as tragic as–mine to figure out that your best bet, if you’re on foot, is to stay right where you are. It really is faster, they say. Their results, published at Cornell’s open-source arxiv.org, are available as a PDF as well as a bunch of those other obscure formats that mathematicians seem to like.
It’s pretty clear reading even for a non-mathematician such as myself. But these folks are obviously not regular bus riders or they would not have assumed, as it seems they do, that you can just catch a later bus at the next stop. A later bus can ruin everything! But that’s another math problem.
I’m also curious to know how the results would change with the addition of a tangential sort of incentive. Like, say, if I can get a cup of coffee at the Toscanini’s up the street, there’s more reason to walk there, but if the bus passes by while I’m paying my friendly cashier, is that cup of coffee enough consolation for being late? Put that in a formula, kids!
I’ve got one more question for you recreational matheaticians. What if I’m not on foot? What if, thanks to my friendly local transit system’s front-of-bus bike racks, I have opted to bike to the bus stop and then wait? Since I can cover greater distances on the bike (which, by the way, is why I almost never walk anywhere), I would need to be traveling a greater distance by bus, thus covering more stops, for bus-riding to be beneficial. Should I wait? Or bike on?
I leave you with this advice, pilfered from the late Dewey Cox:
Bike hard…hard…down life’s…rocky road;
Bike bold…bold…at high speed…that’s my code . . .
[via New Scientist]
A friend of mine has been very excited, and with good reason, about Duck on Bike, a most excellent contraption which one can buy for a very reasonable sum at 
Some of you may be searching for the perfect present for that young biker in your life. Happily, you may purchase a book about nothing else except a duck and a bike: 
Whilst snooping around in Treehugger looking for 