Tidal Transfer Gradients: Optimizing Bus Holding at Ferry Terminals for Littoral Phase Shifts
If you manage bus connections at a ferry terminal, you already know the standard holding playbook: hold the bus five minutes, maybe ten, then release. That works fine when ferries run on a fixed schedule. But at terminals where vessels depart and arrive based on tide windows — think Puget Sound, the Solent, or the Bay of Fundy — the ferry arrival time can shift by twenty minutes or more across a single week. The standard holding interval becomes a gamble. Hold too short and passengers miss the connection; hold too long and the bus delays the entire downstream network. This guide is for planners who have tried the standard approach and found it wanting. We're going to look at a different framing: treating the holding decision as a gradient that changes with the tidal phase, not a fixed number.