Why do buses always come in a bunch? (Italy / Taiwan)

 

Friend in Rome is at a bus stop that serves two bus routes (x and y).  He is catching x, but there are four y buses already, yet no x still after 45 minutes.

    This reminds me of someone in the late 70s or early 80s writing in to the Readers’ Letters page of a newspaper, responding to the oft-expressed observation / question: “Why do buses always come in a bunch?”

    This reader’s analysis / explanation (NB: works better if it’s about same-number buses, i.e., on the same route) is:

    The bus ahead scoops up all the passengers, leaving the following bus with no one to pick up.  If this happens at each stop, the bus ahead gets slowed down as it’s stopping and collecting people, whilst the second bus speeds past each bus stop with nobody there, so it catches up with the first bus in no time, hence the bunching up.  

    (In London, these days, they’re not allowed to do this.  There is a timetable to follow, so they have to arrive at a bus stop at a particular time, e.g., 05 / 25 / 45 minutes past the hour.  If they’re early, they sit at a bus stop and wait, they don’t arrive at a bus stop ahead of schedule.)

    The above reader’s explanation is plausible in general.

    Not, however, if this was Taipei in the winter of 1975/76.

    I decided to do a Japanese course after work at the YMCA in downtown Taipei, where the train station and the Hilton are.  A bustling part of town with loads of buses going to all outskirts of Taipei, so you would’ve thought I was spoilt for choice: both for choice of buses going in my general direction and the frequency.

    Background:  I’m the sort of person who’d stand in a particular queue and find that the other one keeps moving, but not mine.  So, after vacillating for ages, I switch to the other one, only to find that the new one now snarls up, and the one I’ve just left zooms ahead.

    With this in mind, you can see how my post-evening class journeys home panned out.

    I’d arrive at the bus stop either as the first one, or with two or three other people in front of me.  The crowd would start to build up, so that when the bus arrived, there’d be about 20 people.  The people in Taipei of those days (can’t speak for now) were not shy about shoving their way through, and up the bus, whereas I’d been brought up not to behave like a fishwife, not just in not rowing in public, but also not to push and shove.  So, I’d let them get on, thinking I’d catch the next one.

    Exactly the same scenario:  I might’ve been the only one left behind at the bus stop after I withdrew from fighting my way onto the first bus, but before the second bus arrived, another 20 or 30 people would gather.

    This scene would get played out bus after bus.  Taipei was so populated (with people from other parts of the country moving to it for job opportunities) that there was no time for a bus stop to stay empty for long.  Even if buses were to come in a bunch, it’d still be a mad scramble for the door. 

    Every week, I’d get home hours after my evening class ended. 

    To compound the discomfort, I also didn’t have gloves or a woolly hat — because people at that time didn’t wear them (don’t know about now).  I was self-conscious about standing out as being from the tropics, feeling the cold when it wasn’t that cold — another blog in the offing.

(Rome, 2024; Taipei, 1975)