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?
This section requires Javascript.
You are seeing this because something didn't load right. We suggest you, (a) try
refreshing the page, (b) enabling javascript if it is disabled on your browser and,
finally, (c)
loading the
non-javascript version of this page
. We're sorry about the hassle.
We assume my arrival time is time is 1 2 : 0 0 since I can set my arrival time anything with respect to reference.
Let the start of their working time be α minutes after 0:00 and β minutes after 0:00 respectively.
α , β leave remainders with 20, x , y respectively.
Without loss of genrality let x < y .
Our waiting time in this case is x
We want to find the average of this function for all possible values of x , y
Average= ∫ 0 2 0 ∫ 0 y d x d y ∫ 0 2 0 ∫ 0 y x d x d y = 3 2 0 m i n = 4 0 0 s e c