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Rush-hour B3: 20 minutes late, crammed, no word to riders.
Now they’re saying: Maybe February.
That’s the latest word from the state Department of Transportation (DOT) about its repeatedly overdue promise to enable CT Transit riders to find out when and where their often-late buses are arriving at stops in New Haven.
As 2016 drew to a close this weekend, the DOT missed yet another goal for having the system installed.
In late November, a DOT official said the agency expected to be able to “say, ‘Merry Christmas’” to New Haven’s beleaguered bus riders by having fully activated a GPS system on each bus that communicates real-time location information to various apps. Once up and running, the service will be available on riders’ cell phones running Transit App, Google Earth, or Roadify.
DOT had already promised to have that service in place by the end of 2015.
It agreed to the project after New Haven officials, including the mayor, requested the feature and blasted the state for its poor bus service.
But then the DOT decided to test out the system in Hartford, not New Haven. Hartford now has the system.
In March 2016, DOT Public Transportation Administrator Michael Sanders revised the promise. He said New Haven could expect the service to be in place by September 2016.
September came and went. No new service.
By November, the state did have the needed equipment installed on almost all of New Haven’s 129 CT Transit buses. The equipment will also post the names of upcoming stops both inside and outside the buses. But the GPS service couldn’t start yet. That’s because of two new problems.
Problem one: New Haven’s fleet includes different kinds of buses of various ages. That meant the state needed its vendor, a company called the Trapeze Group, to produce a bunch of different wiring harnesses to support the systems. That took extra time.
Problem two: The state needs one central system that enables each district’s dispatch center to access localized information. The DOT discovered that under the current design, dispatchers in New Britain would be seeing information and talking to buses in not just New Britain, but Waterbury, New Haven, and Hartford. That didn’t make sense. But it also didn’t make sense to install separate servers and software and programming in each part of the state, Sanders said. That’s in part because not all regions operate the same way. For instance, unlike in New Haven, CT Transit buses in New Britain are operated not by the state, but by privately owned companies. DOT concluded it shouldn’t be installing state equipment in a non-state-owned facility. So it asked the vendor to design a new statewide multi-agency software system that would enable New Haven, New Britain, Waterbury, and Hartford riders to access real-time info about their local buses without wading through real-time info about other cities’ buses.
In late November, DOT Transit Manager Lisa Rivers predicted the problems would be ironed out within weeks. “We’re hoping before the end of the year,” Rivers said, ”so we can say, ‘Merry Christmas.’”
Come the end of the year — and Sanders reported that the multi-agency software “is behind schedule due to the complications of setting up software like this for six different operating depots. The multi-agency software is necessary so that all data will flow through the central system, but each division only sees and communicates with buses in their own division, and so each app provider using that data will be able to segregate each operating division.”
The new prediction?
“The latest update received from the vendor last week indicates that we will be able to demo the software in early January,” Sanders wrote in an email message, “with go-live for dissemination of real-time location info to the public in New Haven happening by February at the latest.”
Meanwhile, the city is working on a state-funded “mobility” study about how to overhaul the bus system so more people can choose to ride it rather than see it as an option of last resort.