Data vs Intuition: Which Should You Trust?
An Easy Coach Seat Choice Analysis
Picture this: you step onto an empty bus. Every seat is available — front, back, window, aisle. The choice is entirely yours. Where do you sit? Some people head straight to the back, others pick the front, and a few grab the window to watch the world go by. Whichever seat you choose, chances are you’re optimising for safety first, comfort second, and good views last. At least, that’s what we like to believe. Let’s find out!
Here’s the plan: head over to the Easy Coach online booking platform, track bus routes for a month, and record which seat gets booked first (quite a laborious task).
Once we have the data, we rank seats by how often they’re the very first choice. From there, we build a heat map of the bus layout, showing the hierarchy of preference at a glance. To keep things fair, we only compare routes with the same bus configuration.
In short, we’re turning seat decisions into a dataset — and seeing what patterns emerge when people choose their seats.
The Analysis
The seats at the front (rows 1–5) are highly sought after, with a preference for the window side. Seat 1D, right behind the bus driver, is the favourite. What does this heatmap tell us about seat choice?
If safety is top of mind, many passengers instinctively gravitate to the seat beside the driver. The urban legend goes that in an accident, the driver instinctively spares their own side. Fact or fiction, that little myth has a way of steering where people sit. A study conducted in Ghana on “determinants of public transport passengers’ choice of seating positions” found that the seats behind the driver, in the middle and in front were all perceived as safe seats.
A Thai study of bus rollover accidents shows that front seats can be riskier — especially if the rollover happens toward the front or the side you’re sitting on. It also highlights that being seated far from the rollover side (i.e. not on the side that tips — driver side) lowers fatality risk. As stated here, “the most dangerous bus accident is the rollover”.
Conclusion
The intuition doesn’t quite line up with the evidence. Research suggests that the safest seats on a bus aren’t up front beside the driver, but the middle aisle seats. Positioned between the two axles, these spots benefit from the strongest structural reinforcement and are buffered against both head-on and rear-end collisions.
Meanwhile, the sea of red at the back tells another story: passengers avoid those seats less out of fear for their safety and more because of discomfort. It’s a strong signal that, when choosing where to sit, comfort often outweighs safety in practice.
Passengers may head for the front seats under the impression they’re safer, but in reality, it’s comfort they’re chasing. Beliefs are stronger drivers of decisions than data — in this case, intuition overtakes the data.
