King County Metro knows riders waiting at a stop for a scheduled bus that never arrives is a problem. Now it is going to have to keep track of and report “unplanned trip cancellations.”
The King County Council this week passed legislation requiring Metro to study “how it is or could be providing information to riders in real time, either directly or through third-party apps, on such cancellations,” and incorporating the metrics into its ongoing service reports and the next update of Metro Transit’s Service Guidelines.
While the council’s actions will start the process of addressing so-called “ghost buses,” sorting out what new investments are required to properly alert riders and track the totals now needs to be worked out.
Phantom buses that appear on schedules and apps but not at stops continue to be problem after workforce issues peaked coming out of the pandemic for Metro along with employers of all types.
To avoid things like ghost buses, Metro has said cutbacks in service have been necessary due to those ongoing challenges hiring enough drivers and mechanics.
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The fact that the OneBusAway app–which is run by volunteers and funded entirely by donations, not Metro–is still the only semi-reliable way to track busses has always been insane to me. I moved to the hill in 2012 & it was odd even then.
Thanks for your support! :)
Aaron, Exec Director of OneBusAway
Agreed, it is much more reliable than Metro’s electronic signs.
So what they’re doing is showing what times buses would be at a stop if the bus had left its base on time? They’re not real-time tracking the buses and knowing that certain runs had been cancelled?
If I delivered a project like this at work I’d be fired instantly.
Correct!
On a moderately snowy evening a few years ago, there was no bus service on the hill, but the display at the stop by the light rail station kept showing the imminent arrival times and updating them regularly. Probably a couple hundred people each wasted 20 to 30 minutes waiting for buses at that stop before giving up. Why Metro couldn’t contact Sound Transit and ask them to announce that there was no bus service is a mystery.
Had the riders at the station been told, they could, as they walked home, have let people waiting at other stops know that there was no service. Can we find the local corporation that sells that app?
You could try reading about it some before making assumptions…
There’s a public facing system that uses a standard data format. The static bus schedule data has been standard for a while and is pretty standard and easy to display. The real time version of this data is newer and only recently incorporated, it’s mostly an aid for the bus dispatchers and more recently available for riders tracking busses. If you’ve ever left anything on a bus before, the dispatchers know where buses are and when, I’ve been given the time down the the minute to be at a stop and pick something up. It’s a complicated system that has all sorts of random disruptions, what happens when buses divert because of construction or an accident which don’t generally have fully compatible real-time data? If you can build it better than give a quote to KCM…
The real-time information, which currently uses a standard called GTFS-RT, has been around and in use by Metro and other regional transit systems, for much longer than a decade. Real time info predates even OneBusAway. And ghost busses have been a problem all that time.
Yes, and standards for trip detours and stop change data types are being worked on and finalized… If trip timing is essential for you, call the transit helpline and they will get you sorted no problem and generally incredibly friendly.
Getting more of this data sorted and in real time will improve transit performance and the passenger experience, but the agencies primary focus is the basics of bus operations, not app development. Generally the lower tech solution of high frequency routes and simple routing that makes transit super easy without even needing to look at a phone is going to be a better option.
Obviously the real time data has been around for a while, how would an app like OneBusAway work without that real-time data? The whole concept is using that data plus their own algorithms to help predict bus arrivals. It’s an incredibly useful app. There’s a a similar one for Chicago that I used when I lived there from 2010-2012 that was really helpful, but it was even nicer because of the dense and frequent bus network.
Transit networks make that data publicly available, and then nonprofits like OneBusAway and the nonprofit arm of Google and others have worked to develop that data and build out additional standards. Could it be better? Absolutely! Is it the job of our county transit agency? Not really…
have you ever had a good thing to say about transit?
Maybe A.I. and that purple-haired, non-binary kid with the stinky lapdog coding from the apartment below me, all night long, will save us.