SEPTA’s Cross Departmental Team Notifies Riders of Cancelled Buses – Technical.ly
By Katie Malone
To their dismay, Philly bus riders recently noticed more cancellations and missed trips on their transit apps.
Before you gripe: That may actually be a sign of positive upgrades at SEPTA.
So-called ghost buses, or rides that say they’re scheduled to come but never show up, are usually caused by early-morning callouts from operators, SEPTA technologists told Technical.ly. These callouts used to easily get lost in the shuffle, so the related buses were never removed from the system — causing transit apps to show riders a scheduled bus that just never arrives.
A simple form now means you’ll know about cancellations sooner. That’s thanks to the “Ghostbus-ters,” an affectionate name for a multi-department coalition of workers tasked with finding a solution.
“One of the challenges of this problem is that it did lie at the process level, which touched a lot of different departments,” said Katie Monroe, SEPTA project manager for service disruption communications. “So there’s no one department that could have just solved it on their own.”
