Transit Sim V6

Heterogeneous agents · Does bus quality change the attractor? · Fleet research / April 4 2026
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Bunching
Express gap
Cluster pressure (how bunched the system is right now)
Express bus (fast boarding)
Standard bus
Struggling bus (slow boarding)
Patient passenger
Anxious
Nearly gone
The hypothesis: express buses bunch too. Only dispatch changes the attractor.

The question

V5 showed that structure beats optimization — the purple spine mattered more than adding buses. V6 asks a different question: if you give some buses an advantage (faster boarding, higher capacity), does that change the attractor shape, or just who leads the cluster?

Heterogeneous fleet: Large blue circles are Express buses — they board 2x faster and hold more passengers. Small grey circles are Struggling buses — they're slow. Standard buses are in between.

The hypothesis: Express buses don't escape bunching. They become the front of the cluster. The attractor is robust to agent quality. The only intervention that actually changes the shape is the dispatch rule — headway-based holding that operates above the individual agent level.

Toggle between modes to see if the hypothesis holds. If it does: agent quality is mostly noise. System architecture is signal.

Where the question came from: Not buses. A 140-location consumer-finance company spread across Arkansas — Pine Bluff, Jonesboro, Conway, Springdale, Harrison — where strong field managers kept producing the same clustered failures. A high-EQ leader doesn't escape organizational bunching either; they just lead the cluster differently. The intervention that actually changes the shape operates above the individual — a dispatch rule. Without it, better people just produce better-organized failure. Buses were the cleaner model.