In message
, at
05:39:38 on Sat, 17 Mar 2012, Mizter T remarked:
There's buses in Nottingham with "up to every 8 minutes" written on
them. Which defies parsing.

Similarly the Cambridge Park and Ride buses with "up to every 10 minutes".

There's a "glass half full/half empty" issue with these claims.

I read them as "you'll always have to wait at least 10 minutes for a
bus", and it says nothing about how many tph they are offering (the
gullible assume it's 6tph of course).

"up to every 10 minutes" is intended to suggest that the buses run as
frequently as every ten minutes a lot of the time, but less frequently
than that at other times.

Not that they are *more* frequent than that at other times.

Hence if you've just missed one, you can guarantee a wait of ten minutes
at 'peak' periods, and longer than that outside peak periods.

Gullible punters translate "every 10 minutes" into 6tph, even though
(for example) the Oxford Tube's "every 10 minutes" is actually "every
10-15 minutes", even in the peaks, so could be as few as 4tph.
--
Roland Perry