At the Pittsburgh International Airport on the night of Feb. 18, travelers braved freezing temperatures to wait for a bus that never showed up.
Armin Samii was one of those hopeful Pittsburgh Regional Transit [PRT] riders. After he checked the 28X’s projected arrival time on Transit, a popular third-party app that operates in multiple U.S. cities, Samii weighed the pros and cons of taking an expensive Uber or Lyft. When his brief wait turned into an hour, he regretted his gamble on public transit.
“If I knew that I would have to stand there for [an hour], then suddenly paying $50 for an Uber makes sense,” he said.
Samii posted this story on X, formerly Twitter, racking up 67,000 views. One response came from PRT, apologizing for the inconvenience and assuring him that it has been reported.
Samii described himself as a fairly frequent flier, and said he has often witnessed inaccurate arrival information for the 28X recorded in the app.
“It’s a very common occurrence,” he said. “More than half the time when I fly into the Pittsburgh airport, a bus won’t show up. It’ll be a ghost bus.”
A ghost bus is a scheduled bus that appears on bus tracking apps but never arrives.
Adam Brandolph, PRT’s director of public relations, said the likely cause was a shortage of operators. “It’s the single biggest issue facing our system and many other transit systems across the country,” he wrote, adding that they have offered overtime for drivers who help to fill in the gaps.
Beginning to roll out before this summer, “PRT will be expanding customer service hours to provide riders with the ability to reach a live person earlier in the morning and later in the evening by phone or through our digital options, such as our live chat,” wrote Brandolph. This would allow riders to report missing and late buses outside of the current operating hours.
Pittsburghers for Public Transit [PPT], a group of transit riders and workers advocating for accessible public transit, has concerns with ghost buses in the PRT system.
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“It’s great if you can track your bus, but if your bus disappears on the app, then you’re not really sure what to do next,” said Daeja Baker, PPT’s digital organizer.
“Buses are right now less than 70% on time,” Baker added, which she said doesn’t reach PRT’s own goal of 73%. “People aren’t able to get through their day and navigate the transit system in a way that’s beneficial to them.”
Certain routes are more prone to late arrival than others, but not everybody experiences consistent hiccups with their commute. Hiro McCutcheon, a Pittsburgh resident and frequent bus user, finds bus tracking to be a reliable tool for scheduling his day. He uses TrueTime, PRT’s own bus tracking service, which is one of the many public transit apps in the Pittsburgh area.
“I do feel like I can count on the apps most of the time,” he said.
In addition to tracking services like Transit and TrueTime, McCutcheon points toward a website called Transee.ca, a Canada-based site that operates in over 20 cities, including Pittsburgh. “It can sort of give me an idea of which bus is going to actually be coming before I look at the [TrueTime] app,” he said.
Samii has communicated with PRT about these issues for several years now. “It’s so frustrating to me because this is the only city I’ve lived in where this is an issue,” he said. “I don’t understand why years later, we still have this issue that I don’t see in other cities.”
How bus data works
PRT buses each have a computer that tracks location and sends data back to PRT, according to Scott Vetere, the agency’s director of transportation technology. Operators must log on to the GPS at the beginning of their ride so the system can send out location data and arrival information to riders. Location data updates every 30 seconds, and most applications choose to report that information at 30- to 40-second intervals.
Anyone can request and use PRT’s live tracking data to build bus-tracker applications, and third-party apps are also permitted to sell PRT tickets. PRT’s official app, Ready2Ride, is one of six listed on its website. Other applications have come and gone, according to Vetere. In addition to the apps, many PRT bus stops provide a text or QR code for users to track arrival times.
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Operators failing to log in, patchy cellular coverage and buses going off their programmed paths are the main causes of bus tracking discrepancies, according to Vetere. Additionally, because PRT is not related to the third-party apps that use their data, certain programmed features can inaccurately present the location of a bus or fail to report important updates.
“That’s the one thing with third parties is we can give them the data but they still have full control over what they actually publish,” Vetere said.
PRT receives daily complaints about late or missing buses, Vetere said.
“It’s kind of important to get the information of what the bus number is because other than that we have no idea what we’re looking for,” he said. “Then we can have our radio folks at the garage go back and either look at the modem or see what the potential issue is and then get it resolved from there.”
Managing disruptions
Both reliability and accessible information are essential for bus users, said Baker. “PRT users need to be able to expect their bus at certain times to get to where they’re going. And this is an accessibility issue. It’s a class issue,” she said, adding that some transit users don’t have smartphones to track buses.
PRT has made small steps by displaying TrueTime information at certain bus stops, said Baker, “but they need to expand this so that throughout the transit system, more people can have access to those real time.”
One way PRT is addressing issues like ghost buses or delays is through a new system called “disruption management,” according to Samantha Taylor, senior intelligent transportation systems administrator at PRT.
This technology will push alerts to users about late arrivals, ghost buses and detours. Riders can sign up to receive notifications about specific stops or routes and even specify at what times during the day they’d like to be alerted. “The peak function in my opinion of having a disruption management in place is that when your particular stop or your particular route is being altered in some capacity, you’re notified directly as long as you’re signed up to do so,” Taylor said.
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The disruption management system will begin to launch this year. “We hope later to add ‘planned detours’ (detours that we know about in advance like a parade or community festival) to this feature,” Brandolph wrote.
The effort to expand customer service hours “dovetails with the disruption management system,” he wrote. “Our goal for 2024 is to expand one hour earlier and at least until 10 p.m. Then, in a year, we’d determine if we have the resources to extend the hours even later.”
Samii said he views public transit as essential, as “lifelines” for people without other transportation options.
“They’re fixing this specific problem by expanding customer service hours, and I think that’s great,” Samii said. “If we truly believe that everybody should be able to get around Pittsburgh and the region safely without owning a private vehicle, we would treat our city differently.”
Delaney Rauscher Adams is an editorial intern and can be reached at delaney@publicsource.org.
Pamela Smith is a photojournalism intern and can be reached at pamela@publicsource.org.
This story was fact-checked by Miranda Jeyaretnam.
