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Pro tip: check your city bus tracker's ghost bus stats before you leave the house
I ride the 44 bus in Seattle every morning and got tired of watching two buses show up back to back then nothing for 30 minutes, so I pulled up the transit agency's own data dashboard. Turns out they publish how many scheduled trips each route actually completes, and the 44 sits at 87 percent while the 7 downtown runs at 96 percent. That 9 point gap sounds small but it means roughly 1 in 8 of my buses never shows, which explains a lot of my angry mornings. Now I check the live map before I walk out and if two 44s are bunched together I just wait and catch the next one. Has anyone else dug into their own route's numbers like this?
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faith_king8d ago
The part nobody talks about is that those numbers are averaged over the whole day, so they hide when the misses actually happen. A route can look fine at 87 percent overall but be total garbage during rush hour because the gaps get made up on slow midday runs when nobody cares. I pulled the hourly breakdown for my line and the 7 to 8am slot was closer to 70 percent, which is way worse than the headline number suggests. So checking the route stat is a good start but you really want the time-of-day cut, otherwise you're trusting a number that's lying to you about your specific commute.
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