I first noticed something was awry on Tuesday morning. When I take the 16 downtown at that time of day it comes so frequently that I never even have to check my real-time arrivals. But after a few minutes of waiting — it was hot, even at 8 a.m.! — I got curious and fired up the Transit app. What I saw shocked me.
I hadn't seen a lineup like this since the deep pandemic
If you're not a Transit superuser (as I am), the real-time arrivals that bus and train riders can find in the app are the industry gold standard. Orange is good: this means a bus is coming, and you can track its progress using a little bus icon that advances along the route. Grey could mean two things: a bus is coming but it doesn't have quite enough data to formulate an accurate guess, or, sometimes, there's a scheduled bus that doesn't actually exist; also known as the dreaded "ghost bus." During the early days of COVID, there was a lot of grey; bus runs that were canceled due to sick operators. But even then, the canceled bus runs were often denoted as canceled with the scheduled time crossed out, not as an amorphous grey "scheduled."
As I examined my screen that morning, flipping to other routes and trying to figure out what was going on, I looked across the street and saw a bus go the other direction that didn't show up on the app at all.
Nothing was wrong with Metro's bus operations themselves, mind you. My bus arrived and got me downtown right on time. What appeared to be missing was Metro's data, due to a "technical issue" and/or "unexpected internet outages" that has affected a broad swath of Metro's operations this week. A @metrolaalerts tweet went out Monday evening noting service alerts would be delayed — many of the screens at train stations, including ones I observed at 7th and Metro, were simply blank — and fares couldn't be loaded using the TAP mobile app. (Hey, Metro, can we have this information mirrored on Bluesky?) But the outage was bigger than that. Metro employees were told to work from home. Online access to meetings, including a big one Wednesday about the K line, was unavailable. Metro hasn't confirmed if the outage is a cyberattack or not, but either way, it's likely that certain systems will need to remain offline for a bit longer to make sure everything is okay.
I noticed my real-time arrivals were sporadic this morning. Seems like Metro is experiencing some kind of major outage. Employees were told to work from home today. No online access to meetings for the rest of the week. Hearing the word “cyberattack” from more than one person
"Cyberattacks are a major threat to transit agencies everywhere, and that includes the systems they use for real-time tracking," says Stephen Miller (the good one), policy lead at Transit. When you lose vehicle location data — or turn it off, which could have been done as a proactive measure — here's not much Metro can do to help riders with real-time information. But the Transit app, Miller notes, has a backup option. "Crowdsourcing from app users in Transit can help fill the gap until agencies get things back online — sometimes that's in a matter of days; other times recovery can take weeks or even months."
You can use this tool, which is called GO, at any time you're riding a bus or train to help Transit collect more accurate data. When you're in the Transit trip planner, hit the little button that says GO to see how it works. Not only do you get detailed, step-by-step directions to your destination that are particularly helpful to plan your connections, all your progress is tracked by the app. Transit then uses that data to share real-time trip information with other riders, which is particularly helpful for riders navigating in an outage.
The orange/grey trips I was seeing Tuesday morning on the 16 meant that some buses had GO users on them, and some didn't. But overall, it painted a fairly accurate picture of what to expect. That's because about 18 percent of all Metro passengers, about 400,000 riders, use Transit every month. And on an average day, even without an outage, coverage is pretty good, says Miller. "An estimated 20 to 25 percent of Metro trips will, at some point during their run, have someone onboard using GO."
As soon as Transit noticed the loss of Metro data, they saw an increase in GO use, Miller told me. On Tuesday, the first full day of the outage, GO trips jumped 14 percent. They also saw a huge increase in LA-based app downloads — a 50 percent increase. Transit then pushed out their own message to riders encouraging them to use GO until the outage was resolved.
After detecting the real-time outage, Transit sent out this alert encouraging riders to use GO
While it will likely be a few more days before Metro's operations are running at full capacity again, vehicle location data began to return yesterday afternoon. This was easily confirmed by my bus trips later on Wednesday, which were all orange and all correct. Rail is a bit more complicated, so it may be awhile before those train arrival screens are delivering accurate predictions, although this can be an ongoing issue even on regular days.
As always, I have to frame this incident through a megaevent lens: what if this happens during the World Cup, as riders are scrambling to make connections to Metro's dedicated shuttle system to SoFi, or, on an even bigger scale, during the summer of 2028? The outage has also occurred during the exact same timeframe as a record-shattering heat wave, and when I was out both Tuesday and Wednesday testing how well GO was working, I was waiting for buses in 94-degree weather at mostly unshaded stops. Not the best days to miss your ride in a fit of confusion and risk standing even one extra minute in the broiling March (?!?!?) sun. Outage or not, we can't just post tweets; we've got to improve the way we deliver transit information before millions more people get here — for visiting tourists, fans on their first car-free outings, venue workers, and volunteers, as well as Metro's core ridership just trying to get around the city on a regular summer afternoon.
We'll soon find out if we're up to the challenge. Two years ago, Metro ended a partnership making Transit its official app and is planning to have its own app in place by the World Cup. The RFP notes that the goal is to have one app that will be used for trip planning and fare payment. (I'm having trouble linking to old Metro documents, likely due to the outage, but here's a summary on r/LAMetro or @numble, RIP.) Certain elements of the app are also supposed to be live two months before the World Cup starts, and April 11 is right around the corner.
Of course, there's really only one guaranteed solution here: make sure all Metro's buses and trains arrive so frequently and so on-time that you don't really need a trip planner at all. But if you get in a pinch, remember that regardless of what app is on your phone — you can always just use Transit. 🔥
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Unfortunately, the mayor's vision — which feels about 1,000 days too late — is so light on substance that it's hard to see how LA's megaevent future materializes
Alissa Walker
Alissa Walker
