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Discussion on: Memorylessness at the Bus Stop: Using R on transit data to test a hypothesis

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Walker Harrison

Yes the exponential graph never touches zero, which seems impossible but makes more sense if you start to imagine the extremely improbable events that might cause a bus to take a week to arrive.

A grim example: if New York City is bombed, it might take a long time for the transit system to get back up and running, in which case waiting a week for a bus is conceivable. That's very unlikely, but that's also the point--the distribution is near zero for this length wait.

So even though nothing like that has happened (and hopefully never will), the idea could still be captured in the exponential distribution.