You look at the schedules! I think you're mistaking my point, I think they keep the headway padding at the end of the route consistent. But the scheduled length of the trip is different depending on the time of day.
Of course they could decide to go from 29 to 30 minutes by adding even more excessive padding. If they want to increase frequency on the 33 min by adding a bus it'd drop well below 30 mins and they think 33 min isn't far enough.
I think the first point by
@DirectionNorth is that yes, 30m service is superior to 29; I agree.
The reason is memory. The bus comes at 19 and 49 each hour....all day. got it.
When the headway is 29, the bus comes at 19, then 48, then 17, then 46, then 15, then 44 and so on.....its much harder to remember and now I need to look up when the bus is coming, its no longer a reflex.
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The second part of this is that many other services in the GTA and beyond run clock face service. Meaning both the that headway interval neatly divides into an hour, but more specifically that the bus will come at the same times each hour, if the service less frequent.
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The final element is how much recovery time is there in the schedule on any given route. I don't know those answers for York Region, I do for TTC. I'm sure we could find out.
But assuming the padding is comparable to TTC, then on a 60M round-trip route you're looking at typical times in the 8-12 minute range. (scheduled layovers at the terminal), there should be enough slack to tackle clockface service in most cases,
Undoubtedly, there may be the odd exception, where taking 33M to 30M just doesn't work without an extra bus, which in turn would drop the headay to every 20M for argument's sake.....and the cost may not be justified.
The problem in YRT's case is that its odd schedules aren't exceptions, they're norms. And they are norms that drive away riders.
