Revolution #4

By Todd Stadler · Sunday, November 23, 2008 11:05pm

I ride the #4 bus line from home to work every weekday. It's a popular bus line — so much so that on Thursday morning, as not infrequently happens, the bus rolled by me without stopping, since it was already full.

In a way, this was my fault. I'd just barely missed the previous bus as I was walking to the stop near my house. Since I enjoy walking, I decided to just hoof it along the bus line, calling TriMet's Transit Tracker every so often to figure out when I should stop walking and wait for the next bus.

The exercise I got out of this was nice, especially when compared with the boredom of otherwise standing at the stop near my house for 15 minutes. I figured I'd be catching the next bus either way, why not get a little walking done as well? However, the problem with walking towards downtown on a bus line is that the closer you get, the more people there are on the bus, and sometimes the bus gets so full they won't let more people on. (It's like a Yogi Berra quote: nobody rides the #4 anymore, it's too crowded.)

Which makes my walking strategy seem kinda dumb, but you have to consider how bored one can get standing on a sidewalk for 15 minutes, with little else to consider but the horrible architecture of the nearby apartment complex and why somebody left a cardboard box of shoes out in the rain.

But on Thursday, I was reminded that, while 15 minutes of waiting for a bus can be dull, it doesn't seem so bad compared with the experience of having walked for 15 minutes until the next bus catches up and then realizing in the space of a few seconds that the approaching bus doesn't have its turn signal on and isn't actually going to stop and what a jerk that bus driver is and curse you, TriMet! Okay, it's not usually the bus driver's fault, but still.

Of course, I called TriMet to complain, as I always do when the buses get too full, and was told that they would eventually be adding two more morning buses for the #4. Which is nice, I guess. But once I'd (politely) told the TriMet lady how grumpy I was being rained on and not sitting inside a bus taking me to my destination, I had to figure out my next action.

Having just been passed by the #4, the odds were the next #4 would arrive in 15 minutes. I'm lucky to live in an area where I can walk to several other bus lines, so in theory I had other options for how to get to work.

The question was: do I wait here, or is it worth it to walk up to Hawthorne to catch the #14? It takes about eight minutes to walk up to Hawthorne, where the bus also runs about every 15 minutes. So my average wait there is likely to be about seven minutes, which, combined with the eight minutes I took walking there, makes it a wash. I might as well have waited for the next #4, unless I really like walking (which I do, compared to standing still in the rain).

So this problem can be analyzed using probability, but probability isn't very comforting when you walk for eight minutes to a different bus line, only to see the bus go roaring by when you're a block away, resulting in a later arrival time than if you'd just stood there, bored.

But, if I knew that the next #14 was arriving at the closest stop to my current location in, say, nine minutes, it would definitely be worth my while. If I knew it was arriving in less time, I might even be inclined to jog a bit to make it.

(When I started writing this entry, I'd outlined a software solution I wanted to see for a phone to do all these calculations for me and tell me the best route to work, but since then, the iPhone has come out with something remarkably similar to what I wanted. Not that it matters, since I don't have an iPhone, so I'm stuck with these estimations.)

I can call the Transit Tracker to figure out when a bus is arriving at a given location, but unless I have the bus stop number programmed into my phone, it takes several minutes of menu surfing to work it out, at which point the times and calculations in my decision-making have all changed.

The upshot of which is that you have to commit to a plan of action (say, walk up to Hawthorne) while calling the Transit Tracker, in the hopes that it will tell you you've already made the right choice. In theory, hearing the arrival time of the next bus on the alternate route could cause me to turn around and head back to the stop where the bus passed me by, but in practice, I hate turning around, and the fact that that bus didn't bother to stop really makes me want to take a different line, just to teach it a lesson.

The lesson here is that impulsive behavior like mine really is better suited to driving a car. And that standing in the pouring rain doing math is only so much fun.