Waiting for the Bus

I've had some time off work recently and have been out and about in the city on MARTA a little more frequently than usual.  There are two bus routes that run on Highland near our street, and between them, you can get to lots of places -- one of them goes to downtown, and another goes to Midtown, and both connect to rail stations so you can get to everywhere the rail system goes, including the airport.  But the buses don't run very frequently -- if it's not rush hour, you're going to wait a long time, and even in rush hour they may still be 25 minutes or longer apart, so for this to not be a complete exercise in frustration, you need to know when the bus is coming so you get there before the bus you want comes, not after.

This is the premise of MARTA Army's Timely Trip project, to post (and keep current) schedules at neighborhood bus stops.  I've signed up for the two closest to my street, and went to the MARTA Army event a couple of weeks ago to get my updated schedules.  We were at the Atlanta City Studio, temporarily located at Ponce City Market.  The Studio is occupied by real city planners from the City of Atlanta, but is open for visitors and hosts events that are open to the public.  This time, the MARTA Army folks proposed that we personalize the schedule, with art or in some other way.

I opted just for a short message in colored pencil, pointing out that if you took MARTA, you wouldn't have to find a place to park:

And here they are, in place:

Now that's all well and good, but for the posted schedules to be helpful, the buses need to run on schedule, and they don't so much. Sometimes there's little traffic and few passengers to stop for, and they run ahead of schedule, or the traffic is terrible and they run late.  Even that wouldn't be a complete deal-breaker if you could find out that your bus is running 10 minutes early or 15 minutes late - you could plan accordingly.  MARTA does have an app with some helpful functions but you still can't really tell from the "real-time map" when your bus is likely to show up.  This is not one of my bus routes (more about that in a minute) but this is what the map looks like:

The map is not continuously updated, and even when the buses appear on the map, sometimes they disappear or just don't move and and it's hard to figure out from this whether it's time to head for the bus stop or not.  That's when they show up on the map in the first place.  This is the current map for Route 16, the bus that goes south on Highland to downtown:

There should be a southbound bus but nothing shows up (it being early Sunday morning as I am writing this, there is not yet a northbound bus running; that's a separate problem.)  Many of the buses don't seem to have location information available, which makes this function not useful.  (I also tried to take a screen shot of the other route on Highland, Route 36, but every time I try to open that map, the app closes, which is another feature which really limits its usefulness.)

I was complaining about this absence of information about when the buses were expected to show up at the very first MARTA Army event I went to, and someone told me that there is an app that provides this information that the MARTA app does not.  One Bus Away takes the location information from MARTA and projects when your bus is expected to show up.  Or at least it used to; more recently it doesn't seem to know where the buses are, and just shows you the scheduled times, which doesn't help:

Advance Atlanta, one of several groups that is working on regional transit issues, is collaborating with Civic Dinners to provide a framework for people who are interested to get together and discuss what are the problems with transit in the Atlanta region and hopefully get more of us to care about the solutions.  You can sign up to host a dinner or find one that someone else has organized and sign up to attend one.  My neighbor Alyssa hosted the first one last week.  This is not quite our entire group -- one person joined us after this was taken -- but we had good representation from the neighborhood, and and there were several people with professional interest in transit issues.  It was a good discussion, and it was interesting for me to hear other perspectives on the issue.

One of the questions we discussed was if we could magically solve one really big, intractable problem, what would it be?  By the time I spoke up, others that already mentioned the big ones -- absence of an integrated regional transit system, fragmented governance across the metro region, and the racism that is so deeply entangled with transit issues in Atlanta -- so I said I just wanted to be able to tell when the bus was going to show up.  Really, I'd take it more often if it wasn't so frustrating.  This should not be so hard.  Just let us know your best estimate of when the bus is going to show up at the bus stop.

In November, we will have a chance to vote on funding for MARTA.  This is a big opportunity, and there are lots of ideas about how those funds should be invested, if the referendum passes.  Citizens for Progressive Transit put together an interactive website where you can put together your own proposal for how to invest the $2.5B or more that the sales tax is expected to raise over the next 40 years.  But before we extend rail or build more streetcar tracks or even buy more buses, we should fix the system we have so that we know when the bus is probably going to show up. Just that one thing.  It should not be that hard.