Denver RTD Bus Bunching Study

They say bad news comes in threes. Sometimes, too, so do Denver's buses. In twos and threes, Denver's bunched buses bear the bad news of crowding (the front bus is often overfull, with subsequent buses nearly empty), excess waiting (bunching creates long waits between bus arrivals), and underutilization (crowding and unpredictable arrivals reduce public transit use). Caused by the cascading effect of variance in passenger arrivals, bunching bedevils public transit planners not just in Denver but in cities around the globe.

Does bunching follow predictable patterns? This project presents the geotemporal occurrence of bus bunching in Denver for all scheduled RTD passenger routes during July 2020. The goal is better understanding of where and when bunching occurs, to be used as a foundation for approaching the natural follow-on question: "how do we make this better?"

The chart below will show when and where along a bus's route bunching tends to occur. The data is derived from vehicle location information collected for the month of July 1 - 31, 2020 (data collection details). Observations are defined as "bunched" if observed to be operating within 250 feet of another bus servicing the same line in the same direction.

Heatmap of bus bunching on June 11th, 2020 overlaid on OpenStreetMap (OSM) imagery of the Greater Denver Area.