Anyway, note that the timetable you came up with is how they do it in NYC. NYC buses have bus maps on ‘em too.

Good post.

Knowing no Slovak, I got around just fine. It was also heavily subsidized so you could get a day pass for pennies.

I personally like a timetable so I can see and comprehend the whole route / system as I’m used to … but for others this may be too much information or too complex to decipher. In that case I think the Munich time table is a great alternative. It still provides all the same information, but just communicates it in a more concise means, emphasizing the most critical information (ie. when does the bus leave). Quite interesting.

That doesn’t mean that the stem-and-leaf presentation isn’t still better at conveying that information, but I’d be interested to know why, and I don’t think you’ve covered that.

U-bahn: http://www.mvg-mobil.de/aushangfahrplan/pdf/U6_H_MU_52.pdf
Bus: http://www.mvg-mobil.de/aushangfahrplan/pdf/54_H_MUE_74.PDF

http://www.ixda.org/discuss.php?post=36199

Furthermore, I agree with what David Esparza Jr said – when I worked near Tyson’s Corner, I took the 3T from West Falls Church for the first few weeks; I didn’t realize that it took more than twice as long to get to my destination as a number of other buses from the same station. It would have taken me even longer to figure that out if arrival times had not been printed in the schedules for intervening stops.

Mr. Esparza’s idea of printing travel times for common destinations would be helpful, but, unless I’m mistaken, the current grid format indicates the different travel times that passengers can expect at different times of day on certain lines.

Finally, implementing this type of schedule system-wide would mean developing, printing, and posting stop-specific schedules for every single stop in the region (in order to remove any need to “rely on experience or mental extrapolation to know when the bus might show up”). The cost would be much greater than creating a just one complete schedule for each line and posting it at each important stop, as is the current practice.

WMATA’s bus schedules are far from perfect, but your approach seems to improve only the rider’s ability to quickly judge bus frequency, and seems like a bit of a baby-with-the-bathwater approach.

Knowing the time when you might arrive at a certain stop is important for changing lines– a transfer from one line to another would be easier to figure out if you know what time you’ll be at a transfer point.

It also helps in case you decide to get off before or after you intended.

I just have a question about it: When planning a trip along a certain line, how is this approach better at letting someone know how long it will be between the stop they board a bus and the stop where they depart?

I can see how easy it can be to use the stem and leaf, but the older variety of a linear spreadsheet (as shown in the flckr image) seems better at helping people see what time it will be when they get to a destination.

Of course, simply stating the scheduled time differences (showing that a successive stop is X minutes away, the following is Y minutes away, etc) is used where I live on maps at certain bus stops. It’s east math, but I wonder if people would much rather look at the busy spreadsheets than do some arithmetic?

Any thoughts?