I have written two posts on dwell time this week. One on Clyde Street (link) and one for the Sports Wizard blog (link).
I have continued to research dwell time in non-sport contexts. The discovery of Herbert Levinson’s (1983) paper has been very influential in directing my literature searches.
In his paper, Herbert conducted an analysis of transit speeds, delays, and dwell times based on surveys conducted in a cross section of U.S. cities. He concluded that “reducing bus stops from eight to six per mile and dwell times from 20 to 15 sec would reduce travel times from 6 to 4.3 min/mile, a time saving greater than that which could be achieved by eliminating traffic congestion”. He added “transit performance should be improved by keeping the number of stopping places to a minimum”.
I have been thinking about how to visualise stoppages in play in sport. Two of the papers that cite Herbert’s paper offer some insights on how this might be done.
Robert Bertini and Ahmed El-Geneidy (2004) provided a case study of how this visualisation might occur with their estimation of “the values of parameters that affect the total travel time for a particular bus route in Portland, Oregon”. In doing so they shared a trip time model.
Their visualisation of dwell time included:
Mathew Berkow and his colleagues (2007) used colour in their visualisations of transportation in Portland:
Mathew and his colleagues conclude “On the basis of an analysis of 1 year of archived bus dis-patch system data for all routes and stops, the power of using visualization tools to understand the abundance of bus dis-patch system data is demonstrated. In addition, several statistical models are generated to demonstrate the power of statistical analysis in conveying valuable and new transit performance measures beyond what is currently generated at TriMet or in the transit industry in general. It is envisioned that systematic use of these new methods and transit performance measures can help TriMet and other transit agencies improve the quality and reliability of their service”.
These formative discussions about dwell time have really encouraged me to think about pedagogy in sport as well as officiating. In my next dwelling on dwell post I am going to look at referee behaviour at the 2018 FIFA World Cup and the 2019 Asian Cup. It is, I hope, the kind of detailed observation of performance that Herbert, Robert, Ahmed, Mathew and his colleagues might have found interesting.
Photo Credit
Photo by Scott Walsh on Unsplash