Headway

Headway

1) The time distance between successive vehicles operating a bus, train airplane service for example. Important to prospective passengers who want to know how long they have to wait for the next service.

In theory these headway intervals should be as per the published timetable, but traffic congestion and other occurrences arise to interrupt the flow, thus on a three bus per hour schedule passengers may wait a long time and then see three buses arrive together. Clock-face headway is when services operate at regular and evenly-spaced time intervals, eg on the hour, 20 minutes past and 20 minutes to the hour.

Source: David Lowe. The Dictionary of Transport and Logistics. Kogan Page, 2002. – P.113 (288 p.)