The King County Council wants to zap the frequency of “ghost” buses, which are the bane of many transit riders’ existence. A ghost bus is when buses that are scheduled, and even appear inbound on transit apps, never actually come. King County Metro has seen a marked improvement in recent years in delivery of scheduled bus trips, but the agency continues to have a large number of cancelled trips each day.
New legislation passed by the county council directs Metro to better track and report unplanned trip cancellations and improve communications with riders. King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci stressed the need as the council took up the motion, pointing out that ghost buses can discourage riders from taking transit and introduce a lot of stress about navigating the system.
“I think possibly the most frustrating thing that can happen is you’re waiting for a bus, you see on your app that it’s coming, it’s coming, it’s coming, and then you see that it left, and you’re like, ‘No, it didn’t, I was standing right here, and it did not go by,’ possibly exceeded only by buses that go by early,” Balducci said.
The county council legislation was spurred on by the recent annual system evaluation for Metro, which showed that reliability is still a significant problem across the bus system and highlighted the challenge of unplanned trip cancellations. But unlike service reliability data, the annual evaluation does not directly report data about unplanned trip cancellations or buses that are operating but failing to track in real time. Such data is not directly factored into the reliability metric.
“I know Metro doesn’t control the third-party apps, but Metro provides the information and the data that feeds third-party apps,” Balducci said in a committee meeting in February. She expressed worry that data isn’t always getting pushed to third-party apps and said she would like to ensure that Metro does whatever it can to change that.
Metro currently provides real-time and scheduled data to the OneBusAway platform, which distributes data to other third-party apps. Despite the data sharing arrangement, rider ghost bus complaints have continued. Sometimes buses that are not tracking on transit apps still show up, but other times they are cancelled trips that never show up. The inconsistency makes it hard for riders to know what to expect.
Tackling bus reliability issues
Unplanned trip cancellations and service reliability are related but different service metrics. Trip cancellations happen because a bus never leaves the base, breaks down enroute, or gets stuck in traffic before starting a trip, or when there isn’t an available operator. Service reliability can suffer from some of the same issues, like traffic snarls affecting the timeliness of a trip, but measures trips that are completed and arrive at route time points a certain number of minutes ahead or behind of schedule.
Solving service reliability can generally be addressed by increasing service hours dedicated to a route or by coordinating with local governments to install targeted speed and reliability improvements (e.g., bus-only lanes and transit signal priority).
Meanwhile, reducing unplanned trip cancellations require different solutions, such as suspending trips on the schedule or ensuring that staffing and equipment levels are stable enough to support scheduled service.
Since the pandemic, unplanned trip cancellations have waxed and waned. In 2022, cancellations rose as service was restored, the operator staffing shortage persisted, and a vehicle steering column part recall forced the sidelining of equipment. Delivery of scheduled trips fell heavily that year, leading to a low of 93.8%. That was bested by July of 2023 when scheduled trip delivery slipped further to 93.2%, resulting in well over 700 daily trip cancellations on average.
In response to widespread trip cancellations, the county council requested that Metro temporarily trimmed scheduled service to match limited operator and vehicle availability. Metro followed suit with an emergency service reduction in the fall of 2023. That led to significant improvements in delivery of scheduled trips, reaching 97.7% by the end of 2023.
Reliability up, but service and ridership still well below 2019 levels
But to achieve the gains, the agency did have to trim 4% of bus service, pushing it even farther from a full restoration to pre-pandemic service levels.
Reliability issues and lower service frequencies are translating in lagging ridership recovery. Metro’s 2024 ridership was about 69% of 2019 levels, which was worse than the nationwide average of 74%.
Data from 2024 shows that Metro’s scheduled service delivery rates are even better, improving to a range of 98.4% to 99.1%. That translates to about 100 to 190 daily cancelled trips. It’s unclear if that’s the same level of ghost buses that riders are experiencing since sometimes buses fail to track with real-time arrival information on apps, and riders may give up on them if untracked buses are running late.
Metro’s official scheduled trip delivery goal is 99.7% or better, meaning that about 30 trips still end up cancelled on the average day. The agency currently operates about 11,500 trips each weekday.
The plan to address ghost buses
In terms of the approved legislation, Councilmember Balducci and her colleagues are calling on Metro to improve its handling of unplanned trip cancellations in three ways:
- Metro will need to coordinate with the county council this year to identify how it can enhance real-time tools to inform riders about unplanned trip cancellations, particularly through third-party apps, and how cancellation rates compare to peer agencies.
- Metro will need to include data on unplanned trip cancellations and the estimated number of riders impacted by cancellations directly in its annual system evaluation report.
- Metro will need to incorporate unplanned trip cancellation metrics into the agency’s next Service Guidelines policy update. That update is due in 2028, so Metro has some time to develop useful metrics that can be used in the guidelines to inform operational and investment decisions.
For riders, the real-time information piece in the county council’s legislation will be the most noticeable deliverable.
Metro currently offers a transit alerts tool that riders can sign up for to receive email or text message notifications. The tool can provide route-by-route information, including trip cancellations.
Nevertheless, the legislation doesn’t directly address other ways that Metro communicates with riders. For instance, the agency previously published trip cancellation information on social media. That service was retired in early 2023. Service impact alerts also exist in isolation from other transit agencies, such as Sound Transit. That forces riders to consult multiple transit service providers for potential impacts when not using a third-party app.
But if the county council is successful in its requests to improve real-time information and collect and publish better data, riders should see tangible results that make the bus a more attractive option to get around.
Ahead of the final vote on the legislation, Councilmember Jorge Barón expressed strong support for Balducci’s legislation, saying that he had just had a constituent interaction days before about ghost buses and outlining why he felt it was a meaningful tool.
“I think that for the rider experience, whether it’s the bus being delayed or the bus not showing up when, when it’s supposed to, it creates this tension that […] undermines our ability to provide the service,” Councilmember Barón said. “And so, I think it’s important that we have that information so that we can use it to improve the system and make it even better than it is today.”
This article was made possible by the generous support of The Urbanist Fund. The Urbanist Fund is a 501(c)(3) organization that supports local, public-interest journalism. See theurbanistfund.org for more information or to make a tax-deductible gift.
Stephen is a professional urban planner in Puget Sound with a passion for sustainable, livable, and diverse cities. He is especially interested in how policies, regulations, and programs can promote positive outcomes for communities. With stints in great cities like Bellingham and Cork, Stephen currently lives in Seattle. He primarily covers land use and transportation issues and has been with The Urbanist since 2014.
