Look closely at the list of arriving buses in your favorite transit app, and you may notice a phrase you haven’t often seen before.
“Trip canceled.”
That’s bad, right? It sucks that your 7:22 a.m. bus isn’t coming when expected, and you have to hoof it to work, call an Uber, or just stand there, cursing and waiting for the 7:42 to arrive.
But the appearance of those two words also represents a sea change from the old state of affairs, and one that took a lot of work to make happen.
Until recently, SEPTA riders most of the time had no way of knowing that their bus wasn’t ever going to come — that it was a “ghost bus,” showing up in an app or schedule but not in real life.
Now, at least, they can know and plan accordingly.
“It’s not necessarily information that is going to be received as good news, but it does help our riders,” said Lex Powers, SEPTA’s director of service information design.
The change may seem simple, but it turns out that the steps to create a cancellation message — learning that a bus driver is out sick, sending the info to the right people, translating it into a schedule change, and getting that into the SEPTA app or Google Maps — can be kind of complicated.
That was especially the case when SEPTA was still using old methods never meant to produce real-time updates, like handwritten notes of driver absences that got scanned and sent around by email, Powers said.
“A lot of it is retrofitting these systems to be able to keep up with the demands of today when it comes to communications,” he said. “This was the first time we were able to look at it all holistically over the process.”
Who ya gonna call?
Ghost buses are a problem across the public transit industry. They’re often attributed to the inflexibility of old software systems that store worker and vehicle schedules.
Those often pre-date arrival-time prediction systems and even the real-time data feed, called GTFS, that underlies transit apps.
SEPTA officials said in the past that they couldn’t cut a single vehicle trip from a data stream, but only remove a whole block of trips that correspond to a work shift. Rather than delete a bunch of trips — including some that were still happening — the block would be left untouched, giving the impression that a canceled bus or trolley was still coming.
Last year, Powers and his colleagues decided to give the problem a closer look.
The effort came as part of CEO Leslie Richard’s broader effort to make the transit system easier to understand and use. SEPTA revamped its website last year, it’s currently rolling out new names and signage for the different transit lines, clearer detour maps and messages were just announced, and public testing of a new SEPTA app will start soon, among other efforts.
At the same time, a severe driver shortage since the pandemic has made trip cancellations more of an everyday occurrence, and made the accuracy of apps a more urgent matter for riders. The sheer number of buses — there are about 1,100 on the streets, running some 11,900 trips a day — makes it particularly challenging to communicate delays and cancellations, compared to notifying people about changes to train schedules.
“When talking together about which things we really needed to prioritize and which things were affecting the most people, the ghost bus issue came up over and over as something that was really worth a lot of our attention,” Powers said.
The group realized that they didn’t even fully understand the problem. For example, some buses actually were being marked as canceled, even though most weren’t getting tagged.
So this past January, about 15 people from different SEPTA departments — including information design, planning, on-street bus operations, and the control center in the agency’s Market Street headquarters — held an all-day workshop to figure it out.
“Part of the challenge of this problem is that no one could see the whole picture of what was going wrong in that process from just where they sat in their one department,” said Katie Monroe, SEPTA’s program manager for service disruption communications. “So it was only possible to actually define the problem correctly and solve it because we all got in the same room.”
The group was dubbed the “Ghost-busters” — although they say they had no idea it would take nearly until Halloween to devise and publicly release a fix.
Juggling bus cancellations and route detours in real time
To understand the source of cancellation data, the team met with workers at SEPTA’s bus depots around the city. One visit to the Southern District depot in deep South Philly started at 4:30 a.m., she said.
They also hit the street with staffers like Yolanda Jones, a veteran transportation manager in West Philadelphia who spends her days driving her car along bus routes, talking to drivers, arranging detours, making and posting detour signs, getting stuck buses unstuck, and generally putting out fires as needed, while constantly updating SEPTA HQ.
“They are taking in a lot of information, some that comes in via phones and tablets that they have, some that’s coming in over the radio,” Monroe said. Meanwhile, they’re “figuring out the best way for them to manage all of this information that is going between the control center and them and the bus operators on the streets.”
Part of the job for Jones and other transportation managers is knowing which drivers are going to be out at a given time, seeing which routes and specific trips are affected, figuring out whether to officially cancel a trip or look for a replacement driver, and communicating that info up and down the chain of command.
“It has just been humbling throughout this process to see how much all of our operations staff are juggling,” Monroe said.
In some cases, the managers are also involved in un-canceling a trip, and making sure that change gets distributed as well.
“Our goal is to make this process of getting good information to the customers be as easy as possible on our operations staff,” Monroe said, “because then we can get better information to customers, and also because it needs to not be a huge burden because of all the other things they’re doing.”
A (nearly) direct connection from the driver to the rider
One thing the Ghost-busters discovered was that the technical issue related to blocks of trips wasn’t really the main problem — it turned out to be a “red herring,” Monroe said.
While trips are never fully deleted, cancellation notices were, in fact, occasionally wending their way to customers looking at real-time arrival estimates on SEPTA’s website or an app.
But transmission was so primitive and slow that the vast majority didn’t reach SEPTA’s data feed, or not quickly enough to be useful.
“We found a process that involved duplicate entry of the same data into a number of different systems, a process that involved a physical paper form being scanned and emailed around as a PDF, and ultimately, folks being asked to duplicate data entries in different places, who already really have a lot of priorities,” Monroe said.
To cut through the data labyrinth, SEPTA IT staffers built an electronic trip cancellation form as an add-on to the agency’s existing alerts management system, replacing the paper document. When a driver calls out and the info is submitted on the form, a back-end system calculates which specific vehicle trips will need to be canceled. Another page lists the latest cancellations and lets staff modify them if needed.
Development took a few months and involved some back-and-forth on design with the vehicle dispatchers, payroll staff and others who use the form, as well as training sessions organized by SEPTA’s training department.
It was tested in two districts in August, and went live for all buses Sept. 8.
“Most importantly, that information immediately turns into a canceled trip in the actual customer-facing data in seconds. There’s no delay. There’s no other person who has to receive it and enter it in another place,” Monroe said.
The information appears in any interface that taps into the public feed, including SEPTA’s website and app, Google Maps, Transit App, and Apple Maps.
“We both freed up time and energy that was being spent by SEPTA employees, and also drastically reduced the speed to get that information out to riders,” she said.
Next up, solving SEPTA’s budget crisis and hiring 270 more drivers
Because the new effort makes annoying trip disruptions more visible, Powers says he wasn’t sure how riders would react to the cancellation notifications. SEPTA didn’t immediately announce the change.
“We have seen people reference canceled trips more often, but I don’t know if they’re seeing that as a good thing,” he said.
The agency eventually explained the update on its blog in mid-October, to some appreciative but generally muted reactions.
Last week SEPTA announced it’s also addressing another frequent complaint by putting maps of detours on its website, along with clearer text alerts with more information. It’s been posting printed maps of pre-planned detours at some affected bus stops, and plans to integrate the clearer detour info into apps in the future.
Powers and Monroe noted that the underlying cause of the ghost bus phenomenon isn’t a technical issue, but rather the driver shortage that SEPTA and other transit authorities across the country have been grappling with for years now. A spokesperson said SEPTA budgets for 2,700 bus operators and is 270 short, up from a reported 145 in fall 2022.
The agency has ramped up its recruitment effort and last fall reached a one-year contract extension with the Transit Workers Union that provided a 7% wage increase, a $3,000 signing bonus for new hires, and other benefits.
However, the union argues salaries are still low and SEPTA has not sufficiently addressed safety concerns related to violence in stations and on vehicles. Last week, workers voted to authorize a potential strike after the contract expires this Thursday. Agency officials say they are hamstrung in union negotiations by a severe funding crisis and the state legislature’s failure to come up with a budget fix.
Improving data feeds and real-time app info won’t end SEPTA’s budget woes or reduce the number of canceled bus trips. But Monroe said the changes are helping riders cope with disruptions as they arise.
“In a perfect world, we wouldn’t have to cancel any trips, but in the world that we live in, we do,” she said. “At the end of the day, we see it as our responsibility to make sure we give people as accurate information as we can.”
