Real Time Vehicle Location

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Recent report comes out that Muni's on-time rate is only 57.2%. Management was stretching the definition of on time rate to make the number look good. Without using these gimmick, the number is a dismal 57.2%

Should we the citizen be angry about 57% on time rate? The true answer is it doesn't matter. Nobody read the schedule. For the most part the bus is frequent enough that people just show up at the station to wait for the bus to come. What matter is the wait time should be as short as possible and predictable. It doesn't matter if every bus is exactly 10 minutes behind the schedule and the on time rate is 0. As long as they come in regular, even interval, people will hop on a bus with minimal waiting. The service will be as best as it can be.

This leads to and alternative headway based metrics of measuring Muni performance. I plan to use the publicly available NextMuni data feed to analysis the actual performance as experienced by the riders. I'd also propose various strategy to fine tune the operation of the bus base on real time data to smooth out the kink. I would also demonstrate how adherence to a fixed schedule actually aggravate performance problem and how it should be replaced by headway based scheduling.