> When waiting for a bus that comes on average every 10 minutes, your average waiting time will be 10 minutes.
This is very ambiguous. Unless he gives a time frame the numbers do not make sense. Average in a week? Average in a year? This is not how it works in real life.
And I cannot accept his premise. My experience tells me that, in New York, when I used to take a bus to work, sometimes the bus was coming as I was walking to the stop; sometimes I would wait a long time. Sometimes not very long. There was no observable bias.
In statistics, "average" often means "expected value". No time frame is specified (although you could consider it an infinite time frame). With a small sample size your actual average might not be 10 minutes, but as your sample size grows, it will tend toward 10 minutes.
If you are talking about spherical-cow style poisson buses, yeah (that's what the author means by "reasonable assumptions). But as the author concludes, bus arrival times are not well modeled by a poisson process.
This is very ambiguous. Unless he gives a time frame the numbers do not make sense. Average in a week? Average in a year? This is not how it works in real life.
And I cannot accept his premise. My experience tells me that, in New York, when I used to take a bus to work, sometimes the bus was coming as I was walking to the stop; sometimes I would wait a long time. Sometimes not very long. There was no observable bias.