Ghosted by Your Bus?

A blog post from Transit Center explains the phenomenon of “ghost buses,” buses that appear on smartphone apps as minutes away only to never materialize at the station.

“What’s behind this alarming rise in ghost buses? Amid a national shortfall of transit operators, years in the making and worsened by the pandemic, there simply aren’t enough bus operators to run all the trips that transit agencies schedule.” In Los Angeles, the county’s transit agency canceled 1 in 6 trips in January of this year due to a shortage of 600 operators.

There are technical challenges to tracking ghost buses, for riders and agencies alike. Transponders aboard en-route buses share their locations via GPS, feeding real-time arrival boards and trip-planning apps. Canceled trips don’t generate GPS locations, so apps reference and display scheduled arrival data instead. This misleads riders into thinking their bus is running when it’s not.

The blog post recommends that transit agencies begin by tracking and publishing canceled buses to provide more transparency and identify solutions. “Agencies also need to be realistic about the amount of service they can provide with the labor force they have, and adjust schedules accordingly.”

The root of the problem, the blog post cautions, is the structural problems leading to the operator shortage. Transit agencies “must radically improve the job for operators by raising pay and improving working conditions. They must also attract new operators by offering signing bonuses and addressing roadblocks to starting the job, like long waits to receive commercial drivers’ licenses and unnecessarily strict drug testing.”