How Can Public Transit Support Off-Peak Passengers?

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Not Every Passenger is a Commuter:
What About Other Types of Journeys?

Almost every major decision a transport operator makes is anchored to a specific part of the day. The morning rush determines how many buses a network needs to own, how many drivers it needs to employ, and how much of the annual operating budget is already committed before a single midday departure is scheduled. Peak demand is the design constraint, and the rest of the timetable is built with what remains.

The result is a shape most passengers would recognize without ever seeing a schedule. Buses run close together between roughly seven and nine in the morning, close together again in the late afternoon, and noticeably further apart in the hours between. The gap widens further in the evening and on weekends. That shape reflects a specific assumption about how a day is organized: out to work in the morning, back home at the end of it, made by an adult whose hours are set by a workplace. However, for a significant share of passengers, the day does not look like that at all.

Consider a journey that begins at home, stops at a school to drop off a child, continues to a workplace, turns back in the afternoon to collect that child from daycare, adds a grocery store, and finally ends at home. That is a single journey made of five separate boardings, and almost all of it takes place in the hours when the timetable is at its thinnest. It is also one of the most ordinary shapes a day takes for anyone responsible for another person.

Which raises a question worth examining more closely: when a network concentrates its service at the two ends of the day, what does that cost the passengers whose journeys fall in between?

🧭 The Journeys for Which the Timetable Was Not Built

Before asking what a thin midday service costs, it is worth establishing who is travelling during those hours in the first place. The answer warrants more attention than this sector usually receives.

A new report from the Transit Cooperative Research Program – TCRP at the Transportation Research Board, Addressing Travel Needs of Women and Families on Public Transportation, gathers that evidence into one place. Reviewing decades of research on how women travel, the report finds that women take more trips overall than men, are more likely to travel with dependents, are more likely to be carrying bags or pushing a stroller, and are more likely to travel outside traditional peak hours.

Taken separately, those findings look like a list of demographic details. Taken together, they describe something more specific: a passenger who needs the network to operate in more places, at more times of day, and under more physical constraints than the commuter the timetable was designed to serve. Furthermore, the report makes it clear that this is not mainly about gender preference. It traces the pattern back to the uneven distribution of caregiving and household responsibilities, which shapes when a person travels, where they need to go, and how many stops they have to make along the way.

That last point has a name in transport research. The report describes these passengers as more likely to “trip chain”, which it defines as combining several trips into a single journey with multiple stops. It is worth examining what that actually means, because the difference between a trip chain and a commute is not just a matter of length. A commute is two separate trips with one purpose each: out in the morning, back in the evening. A chained journey is one continuous outing with several purposes strung together, where each stop is a link in a sequence. Chaining is usually the efficient choice, since the alternative is returning home between every errand. But it also means the whole journey is only as dependable as its weakest link. If one bus does not arrive, every stop after it moves, and some of the tasks have deadlines attached. A nursery closes at a fixed time. A clinic appointment does not wait.

The timing of those links is also set by other people. When one of the travellers is a child or an older relative rather than a working adult, the journey is scheduled around a school day or a care appointment, not around office hours. Consequently, these journeys drift away from the peaks and into the middle of the day.

The pattern is also larger than transport statistics have historically shown. Ines Sanchez de Madariaga, whose work introduced the term “mobility of care” into transport planning, designed a survey in metropolitan Madrid specifically to count these trips as one category, rather than scattering them across shopping, escorting and personal travel. Counted that way, trips made to care for others and maintain a household came out almost equal in number to trips made for employment. Conventional travel surveys tend to miss them for two reasons: they leave out short walking segments, and they break one chained journey into several unrelated fragments, so a single outing with five stops is recorded as five minor unconnected trips.

The planning consequence follows directly, and the Transit Cooperative Research Program – TCRP report states it plainly; these travel patterns are best served by a frequent network that connects childcare, education, shopping, healthcare and community destinations, not only employment centers.

So, the trips exist, they are numerous, and they are concentrated in exactly the hours where service is thinnest. The next question is what that mismatch actually costs the person making the journey.

⏳ Why an Extra Wait Costs More Than the Clock Shows

On a commute, the gap between buses is paid for twice a day. On a journey that runs from home to a school to a workplace to childcare to a grocery store and home again, it is paid for at every stop. The Transit Cooperative Research Program – TCRP report makes this point in its own terms: passengers who chain trips lose more time to unreliable service, because the effect compounds across each leg of the journey.

The arithmetic is simple and unforgiving. A twenty-minute gap between buses is an inconvenience on a commute. Across five boardings it accumulates into the better part of a working hour and is spent standing still. This is the best-case scenario, where every bus arrives as scheduled. A single missed connection early in the chain pushes everything else back, and unlike a commuter, a passenger on a chained journey often cannot absorb the delay by arriving somewhere a little later.

Those minutes are also not experienced the way the schedule records them. A study by Fan, Guthrie and Levinson published in Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice surveyed more than 800 passengers across 36 stops and stations while separately measuring on video how long each of them had actually waited. At a stop with no amenities, a ten-minute wait was reported as twenty-one minutes. A wait of two and a half minutes was reported as eight. Two of their findings are directly relevant to the journeys described above. The first is that waits in the middle of the day were reported as longer than morning-peak waits of the same measured length, as were waits by passengers travelling alone. The second concerns who is affected most. For a woman waiting at a bare curbside stop in surroundings she perceived as insecure, a ten-minute wait was reported as close to half an hour.

That connects to something the Transit Cooperative Research Program – TCRP report treats as central rather than incidental: personal safety is a greater concern for women, both when travelling alone and when travelling with children, and it influences whether they use the service at all.

This is where frequency stops being a question of convenience. It is one of the few levers an operator holds that acts on both problems at once. A shorter gap between buses is less time lost, and it is also less time spent waiting uncomfortably while standing alone at a stop after dark.

📉 Why Midday Service Is Usually the First Thing Cut

If the case for all-day frequency is this clear, why does service still thin out between the peaks? The answer has less to do with demand than with cost, and the sector has been fairly direct about it.

A study published in Research in Transportation Economics put the question to the people who manage the budgets. Working with Swedish bus operators and public transport authorities, the researchers took nine cost factors that the industry itself had previously identified and asked participants to rate them against one another. The result was not close. Peak traffic and the costs that follow from it rated above every other factor, ahead of working time regulations, vehicle age requirements, fleet greening, and the tendering process.

What “the costs that follow from it” means in practice is not complicated. A fleet is sized by its busiest hour, so the vehicles an operator owns and the drivers it employs are set by what the morning rush requires. By late morning, much of that capacity is idle, and the budget that paid for it has already been spent. Adding midday service means finding room in a working day that has already been divided around two rush periods.

Some agencies are already reorganizing around that. Pittsburgh Regional Transit’s Bus Line Refresh states plainly that ridership has returned more strongly at midday, in the evenings and on weekends than during peak commuting hours, and rebuilds the network to match. Under the plan, routes running every 30 minutes or better at midday increase from 27 to 43, every route in the network runs at least hourly, and both Saturday and Sunday service increase. The plan is fiscally constrained to the existing operating budget. It also names the trips it is designed to serve: shift work, healthcare visits, education, errands and weekend travel.

That last detail is the important one. Pittsburgh is not adding service. It is moving service it already has from one part of the day to another, which means every midday improvement is funded by a reduction somewhere else. Which raises the question for the sector: what would it take to run frequent all-day service without having to take it from the peak?

🚍 Imagry’s Approach: Autonomy Aimed at the Middle of the Day

One answer is to change what an additional departure costs. Under conventional operation, every extra bus put on the road requires an available driver, which is why the hours between the peaks are the hardest to fill and usually the first to be cut.

At Imagry Autonomous Buses, we see autonomy as a way to loosen that constraint: more consistent frequency across the entire service day, longer operating hours, and service during periods that are difficult to justify under conventional scheduling.

Autonomous buses do not resolve all the mobility challenges facing women and families, and it would be wrong to suggest otherwise. What the evidence describes is a service need rather than a technology gap: transit that stays frequent and reliable outside the traditional peaks. The journey that starts at home, stops at a school, and collects a child on the way back is not an unusual trip. It is a trip that was simply not included in the timetable. Public transport becomes more useful when it works for the journeys people actually make, not only the commute it was designed around.

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