Ever lose patience waiting for a bus and decided to walk instead? Next time, stick around, it鈥檚 nearly always the best strategy.
Scott Kominers, a mathematician at Harvard University, and his colleagues derived a formula for the optimal time that you should wait for a tardy bus at each stop en route before giving up and walking on. 鈥淢any mathematicians probably ponder this on their way to work, but never get round to working it out,鈥� he says.
The team found that the solution was surprisingly simple. When both options seem reasonably attractive, the formula advises you to choose the 鈥渓azy鈥� option: wait at the first stop, no matter how frustrating ().
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The formula does break down in extreme cases, Kominers says, when the time interval between buses is longer than an hour, for example, and your destination is only a kilometre away.
If you do choose to walk, you should make your decision before you start waiting, he says. You will still reach your destination later than the bus you鈥檇 have caught, but it will be much less frustrating than waiting for a while and then watching the bus shoot by. 鈥淚t certainly has changed the way I travel,鈥� Kominers says.
