Paul Bass Photo
Paris and Pelaggi: Not connecting.
Doug Hausladen was ready for a victory ride on a CT Transit bus — until the app he succeeded in lobbying for had other ideas.
Hausladen is New Haven’s transit chief. Mayor Toni Harp appointed him to the post in 2014. From the start he and Harp pushed the state to improve its bus service in New Haven — specifically asking the state to install GPS devices that would enable riders to learn (as often happens) when buses are running late, and how late.
The Malloy administration eventually said yes. Then it installed the devices in Hartford, not New Haven. It promised to equip New Haven buses in 2015. Then 2016. A series of mishaps and delays ensued. (Read about some of that here and here.) Finally, in January, New Haven State Sen. (and Senate President) Martin Looney blasted the Department of Transportation (DOT) in a letter inquiring about the endless delays and broken promises, among its generally lackluster bus performance; he noted that New Haveners’ 10 million annual trips account for “almost 23 percent” of all state bus ridership, yet the city gets only 7 percent of the routes. And within months, with no fanfare or measurable public notice (despite repeated press requests for updates) or prominent display on state web pages, the GPS devices appeared on the New Haven buses, available through the Transit and Google Transit apps.
Lucy Gellman Photo
Doug Hausladen.
So Hausladen decided to access the new Transit App connecting to the GPS devices last week when he was heading home from City Hall to City Point. He picked up a 10-day pass at the CT Transit booth on the Green (which the state has since closed indefinitely) and asked when the next Z would arrive at Orange and Chapel. Four minutes, he was told.
He headed to the intersection. The bus didn’t show on time. Hausladen went to the app to find out where the bus was, how soon it would arrive. The map was blank. It didn’t show the bus.
The bus arrived six to eight minutes late. Hausladen got on. Curious, he checked the app again. By the time the bus arrived on Sargent Drive, “halfway through my bus trip,” the Z bus suddenly popped up as being on Sargent Drive. “I knew where the bus was,” he said — after he was already on it.
“It’s a great investment. It’s a good management tool,” Hausladen said of the app. “It didn’t help me on my trip.
“The app was not as helpful as I was anticipating.”
Paul Bass Photo
Hausladen said he’s hearing similar complaints from New Haveners about the app not working, or giving inaccurate information about buses’ whereabouts. More often, when he tells people that the app has arrived, “everyone says, ‘Oh my gosh. Is that real?”
He checked with DOT and learned that the state “still has some improvements to make on the” Trapeze brand software it uses.
DOT spokesman Kevin Nursick said this week that the Trapeze software is “highly regarded in the industry.”
“We are replacing our aging fleet of busses and are implementing the software, and training drivers on the use of the system,” he wrote in an email message. “So, there may be a few hiccups along the way, but overall, the rollout has been smooth, albeit a bit delayed.”
You can access the app at this link.
Rush-hour B3: 20 minutes late, crammed.
Given tight finances, the DOT is “not currently in a budgetary position to aggressively market the app, its features and functionality for transit users,” Nursick stated. Thanks to “word of mouth,” he added, “the word is getting out there.”
Some bus riders interviewed on the Green hadn’t heard of the app. Others, like Elexis (she decline to give her last name), a Gateway student waiting to catch a bus home, said she uses it often because “typically the B & M buses are almost always late.”
Paris Cain and David Pelaggi have had less success with the app.
Pelaggi, who’s blind, said the screen reader he uses didn’t function with the app.
Cain, a Gateway student, said she tried the app recently when her bus was running late. “It told me I was an hour early,” she reported.