Expected waiting time at bus stop

Each time I arrive at College Park metro station, I have to wait for a bus. There are two buses that I can take. One is University Shuttle and the other is the city bus. I have no preference between these two. Each bus comes every 20 minutes and they start working at independent times in the morning.

What is the expected number of seconds that I have to wait until a bus arrives?


The answer is 400.

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2 solutions

Ronak Agarwal
Sep 28, 2014

We assume my arrival time is time is 12 : 00 12:00 since I can set my arrival time anything with respect to reference.

Let the start of their working time be α \alpha minutes after 0:00 and β \beta minutes after 0:00 respectively.

α \alpha , β \beta leave remainders with 20, x , y x,y respectively.

Without loss of genrality let x < y x<y .

Our waiting time in this case is x x

We want to find the average of this function for all possible values of x , y x,y

Average= 0 20 0 y x d x d y 0 20 0 y d x d y = 20 3 m i n = 400 s e c \frac { \displaystyle \int _{ 0 }^{ 20 }{ \int _{ 0 }^{ y }{ xdxdy } } }{ \displaystyle \int _{ 0 }^{ 20 }{ \displaystyle \int _{ 0 }^{ y }{ dxdy } } }=\dfrac{20}{3} min=400 sec

same way as I did :)

Ayush Garg - 6 years, 8 months ago
Fatrick Chao
Aug 11, 2014

Assume the first bus arrives 0:00, and the second bus arrives at 0:x, where x < 20 x<20 . You arrive from 0:00 to 0:20. Notice the wait time varies linearly, with a minimum at 0:10, where you wait an average of 5 minutes, and a max at the endpoints, with 10 minutes. Thus, the average can be seen as the weighted average, or 5 2 + 10 3 \frac {5*2+10}{3} minutes, or 400 \boxed{400} seconds

pls explain more;

i) at 0:00 endpoint I agree average wait is 10, but at 0:20 endpoint the wait av wait should be 0 at the closest bus would be the 0:20 bus

ii) how did you get the weighted mean? why weight 2:1 for 5 and 10 times?

Saket Joshi - 6 years, 7 months ago

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