Metro’s bus prediction system is struggling to track buses, leaving riders waiting with bad information. The NextBus system remains as unreliable now as it was in October 2007, when Metro officials decided to “pause” a pilot of the system because it was not accurate enough. But the program, which relies on GPS signaling to help predict when a bus will arrive at a given stop, won’t be better anytime soon. The transit agency estimates it will take about two years to improve the reliability.
NextBus currently predicts bus arrivals correctly about 80 percent of the time, according to Metro. On a typical day during peak service, as many as 140 of the 1,250 buses operating aren’t predicting arrival times.
Three types of technological problems are generally to blame: issues with the tracking equipment on the buses, malfunctioning employee ID cards and problems with the fare system.
Metro officials said they think they know how they can fix much of the problems, bringing predictability up to 95 percent.
The agency hopes to award a contract for new tracking equipment by April. Then it would take about 18 to 24 months to replace it on all the buses.
In the meantime, Jack Requa, who oversees bus operations, told a D.C. Council committee that the agency pulls the buses with problems during weekends, when fewer are needed to meet the schedule demands.
The NextBus program is supposed to help riders with the perennially late bus system. In January, 78.5 percent of buses were considered on time, which means no more than two minutes earlier or seven minutes later than the schedule.
With NextBus, though, GPS signals track buses, then predict where they will be on the route. Riders can call in to an interactive system on the phone or visit a Web site to find out when the next bus will arrive. It was intended to help riders avoid relying on a schedule.
The transit agency initially started the program in 2007 before pulling the plug after reliability problems.
It then restarted it in July 2009, after then-General Manager John Catoe told riders it would be “worth the wait” because the agency was making sure “we have everything in place” to meet a 95 percent accuracy goal.
