Reality, Perceived Reality, and Reported Reality
The feeling of confusion, concern, and irritation that comes with waiting for an uncertain bus is ubiquitous for transit riders. Sure, some systems are more punctual and reliable than others, but human nature’s constant desire for certainty and information makes even the smallest deviations painful.
This desire is perhaps most apparent in airports, where the travel process comes with a relatively high sense of certainty (a reserved seat on a scheduled plane in a controlled and secured environment), but also a relatively high consequence of failure (flights are hours apart, missed connections can delay passengers for significant periods of time). Passengers form queues at the first hint of a boarding announcement or crowd nervously into a security check or border crossing. These moments reveal where confidence in the system is lowest and unreliability is highest.
For this reason, reliability typically sits at or near the top (along with service frequency) for the most important attributes of a transit service. Unfortunately, what riders experience and what is reported can often feel out of sync, or in some cases completely at odds with the passenger’s reality. This is compounded by the fact that one minute of waiting time can be perceived as more than double by a passenger in some cases.
The first image is a screenshot from the Toronto Transit Commission’s (TTC) daily performance report; the second image is from Calgary Transit’s website (a recent update seems to have removed it) reporting bus on-time performance over time. Here are the underlying issues that make these scorecards problematic:
- Aggregation: Averaging accross an entire day (TTC) or month (Calgary) and accross an entire system washes out any information about which routes are higher perofrming or how much various routes have changed over time. Even simple distinctions between express/BRT buses and regular buses or core network routes versus suburban feeders would provide a visitor insight into how the service they use is performing.