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Comment by timr | Hacker News Reader

Looking at some of the bus routes confirms something I've suspected about MUNI for a long time: most of the "delays" happen at the beginning of the route. I've watched bus drivers sit there for 10+ minutes past the departure time on many occasions, and there appears to be no penalty for the behavior.

I don't know if the drivers are taking a mandated minimum break, waiting in response to orders from dispatch, or just being lazy, but when I see lots of long delays at the top/bottom of every single line on these graphs, it really drives home the source of the problem. I find it difficult to believe that buses leaving at 5AM are encountering enough traffic to cause 15 minute delays immediately upon departure.

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Are you sure that's not "the bus driver is waiting for his clock to read the scheduled departure time" or "the bus driver is waiting for people to pay their fare and board the bus" or "the bus driver turned the bus on early to warm it up"?

Every bus I've ridden in has signs plastered all over the front saying how you need to idle it when starting up / shutting down the bus to avoid destroying the innards, so I would expect there to be long horizontal lines at the start/end of runs but I wouldn't expect that to be indicative of drivers being "lazy".

Hang out around Embarcadero Station during evening rush or 4th & King sometime. It's a real mess. I've seen 4 busses running back to back, and some mornings I'll see 5 or more trains backed up. Not to mention the entire system already runs at a snail's pace. I generally bike, and I will usually get there in about 1/2 the time. Compare to Chicago where there's no way I could outrun a CTA bus, let alone the trains.

Yeah, that's fine. I expect delays at rush hour. I don't expect to see nearly every departure for nearly every line delayed by ten minutes or more. That's what these plots seem to be suggesting.

Am I sure? No. That's why I said I didn't know if they were waiting for dispatch, or something else. But I find it implausible that those sorts of delays would cause nearly every departure to be 10+ minutes late at the start of the route, as they seem to in these plots.

Also, I have a lot of direct experience with drivers on certain lines just sleeping in the back of their buses until past the departure time.

What is likely the cause of this is that the previous bus left late due to external delays you weren't aware of, and the next bus waits to leave, even if it will leave late, so that the time between the two will be roughly the same.

I'm relatively confident Muni drivers are not intentionally leaving 10min early, since running an entire route 10min late makes it nearly impossible for them to use the restroom during the time between when they hit their last stop and must turn around and begin running again - a major complaint of the muni drivers' union.

If you look at these graphs, you'll consistently see horizontal lines in front of the first bus of the day, or on busses that run an hour apart.

That's not a delay due to the previous bus being late.

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