Long story short, having a slew of people trying to board and disembark at the same time creates a lot of delay. It seems like the sort of thing you could address by having trailing bus(es) during peak hours. But if you're just naively running one bus every X minutes that stops at all stops along a given route, you'll inevitably have back up issues.
Definitely. Of course, MUNI compounds the problem by running absurdly small buses on popular routes (infrequently!) and stopping them nearly every block.
I don't know what ridiculous decision making resulted in this system, but it's not as if the problems are difficult to diagnose.
Long story short, having a slew of people trying to board and disembark at the same time creates a lot of delay. It seems like the sort of thing you could address by having trailing bus(es) during peak hours. But if you're just naively running one bus every X minutes that stops at all stops along a given route, you'll inevitably have back up issues.