Lonely passengers: A short proof

A fixed number of passengers independently board one of several buses uniformly at random. The lonely passenger problem is to prove that the probability of at least one passenger being the only one in their bus is increasing in the number of buses. It was solved in a strong form by Imre Péter Tóth, who proved stochastic dominance of the number of such passengers as the number of buses increases, but observed that, surprisingly, no short proof was known ``despite the efforts of several experts''. We give a very short proof of the weaker result. The proof of the strong form, using the same idea, is more involved but still relatively short.

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Publication Details

Journal
Electronic Communications in Probability
Published
2025-01-01
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1214/25-ecp722
Primary Topic
Transportation Planning and Optimization
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

Lonely passengers: A short proof

John Haslegrave
Electronic Communications in Probability
Transportation Planning and Optimization
article

Lonely passengers: A short proof

John Haslegrave
article en

Abstract

A fixed number of passengers independently board one of several buses uniformly at random. The lonely passenger problem is to prove that the probability of at least one passenger being the only one in their bus is increasing in the number of buses. It was solved in a strong form by Imre Péter Tóth, who proved stochastic dominance of the number of such passengers as the number of buses increases, but observed that, surprisingly, no short proof was known ``despite the efforts of several experts''. We give a very short proof of the weaker result. The proof of the strong form, using the same idea, is more involved but still relatively short.

Electronic Communications in ProbabilityVol. 30(none)
Lancaster University (GB)
Openalex Percentile: Top 72%
Transportation Planning and Optimization
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