RTA launched a new app called Le Pass in August 2022. The app uses GPS technology to track buses. While it does include information about route delays, Ride says the updates don’t appear quickly enough, leaving riders waiting at stops with no idea when to expect to get picked up or whether they should change their transportation plans.
“What we’re frustrated by is that we don’t have real information from the RTA on how the service issues are affecting different parts of the system,” Buckley said.
Buckley said riders are reporting to Ride that sometimes the Le Pass app will sometimes show a bus’ location where there is no bus and sometimes a bus will be running and won’t show up on the app.
And when a bus breakdown causes a delay, the app only tells users there are “significant delays,” but it doesn’t offer added information about a vehicle being taken off its line.
That's great. I've literally had RTA workers tell me not to use Le Pass. It can't even tell you whether or not a real bus is coming, let alone begin to figure out why it isn't.
Hankins said she’s trying to work on getting more accurate information out to the public, but it’s hard to know how long a delay might take.
“What I have gleaned from my peers across the country is they will say there is an incident on this line [or] police activity on this line, but they can’t describe how long the delay will be. Whereas our app just says there’s a delay. And so how do we … give riders better information?” Hankins asked. “That is something I’m challenging our team to try to figure out.”
To be fair, there are a lot of factors to consider in estimating delays in New Orleans. Maybe a tree has fallen on a bus. That could take an hour or so. A flooded street might mean two or three hours. But what if a sinkhole has swallowed a bus whole? That might take longer. Perhaps a building has collapsed onto a streetcar line. Now we are talking about a years' long delay. All of this may be beyond the app's ability to compute efficiently.
Or maybe the delay is caused by something more mundane. Like, for example, decades of negligence.
On its worst day the agency had only 78 buses available. At its best, it had 89, one shy of what the agency says is the ideal number — 90 buses — to accommodate.
In an interview last month, RTA CEO Lona Edwards Hankins acknowledged that the transit agency is facing a number of challenges in providing reliable service to its bus riders.
The fleet size is down by more than 50 percent from its pre-Katrina number, when it was about 370 strong, according to media reports from the time. Much of that fleet — about 200 buses — was destroyed in the citywide flooding that followed the 2005 storm, The Times-Picayune reported in 2009, and the remaining buses were aging out of usefulness.
After receiving funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and settling with its insurance company, the RTA purchased 137 new buses between 2008 and 2012, officials told Verite.
But Hankins, who was named CEO in March, said there wasn’t a long-term purchasing plan in place.
Whatever the case, you're probably gonna be waiting a while. Maybe just have the app say that.
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