New bus-tracking system to tackle “ghost buses” and “disappearing buses”

Oh yes, says Martina Dow, waiting at a bus stop on Church Street on about 10.15 on Tuesday morning, she’s familiar with the buses that exist only on the digital signs and the app – but not in real life.

She gets around the city by bus a lot, and it’s common enough to stand at a stop waiting as the bus supposedly gets closer and the number of minutes until its arrival ticks down to zero.

And then no bus appears.

“It happens sometimes,” Dow says. “It’s kind of irritating for me, but I’m flexible because I’m semi-retired. But for people trying to get to work it could be a real problem.”

Even as the government has been pushing people to do without cars and choose public transport instead, the backbone of the city’s public transport system, the buses, have suffered from a reputation for being unreliable.

These disappearing buses – created when a bus is cancelled but the operator doesn’t tell the RTPI system, so it continues to appear on the signs and the apps – contribute to this problem. Dow says she hopes the problem will be fixed soon.

“Buses are so important,” she says. “We should have a superb public transport system. Then more people would use it instead of cars.”

Well, a solution might be on the way. The National Transport Authority (NTA) in December awarded a €68.5 million contract to Trapeze Group UK Ltd to bring in a new automatic vehicle location (AVL) system.

“The solutions to be implemented by Trapeze will address both ‘ghost buses’ and ‘disappearing buses’,” another NTA spokesperson said.

If all goes well, the roll-out of the new system will start in late 2025 and be complete by late 2026, a spokesperson for the NTA said by email on Tuesday.

Disappearing buses

Dublin Bus, which operates most of the routes in the city, has over the past couple of years become more reliable, according to NTA figures.

It scores bus companies on reliability by keeping track of the percent of kilometres of route that they should have operated but didn’t.

This spiked around July 2022 at 7.4 percent, and then fell to 2.4 percent in March 2024. But that’s still above the target of 2 percent.

Reliability is still enough of a problem that Colin Stenzel always leaves home early, in case the bus he’s planning to catch doesn’t show, he says, waiting for his bus on Arran Quay on Tuesday about 10am.

And the real time passenger information sign at the bus stop can’t be fully trusted either, Stenzel says. “I was waiting for a bus the other day and it said it would come in five minutes and then eventually it said it had arrived – but it never did,” he says.

This is what the NTA would call a “disappearing bus”, a spokesperson said. As distinct from a “ghost bus”, which is one that appears at a stop all of a sudden even though it’s not on the digital board or any app, she said.

Disappearing buses are created when a bus is cancelled, but someone at one of the bus companies doesn’t tell the real-time passenger information system that, said Transport Minister Eamon Ryan, a Green Party TD, in a July response to a question from Sinn Féin TD Paul Donnelly.

Apps like TFI live “cannot display a service as cancelled if it has not received the appropriate cancellation message from the operator and as a result it reverts to showing the timetabled time that the bus is due to arrive at a stop”, Ryan said.

Stephen McBride, an app developer who developed the Next Dublin Bus app in 2011, explained in a bit more detail in 2022.

Buses have onboard computers, with GPS navigation systems – and that GPS data is beamed to automatic vehicle location (AVL) software, and matched with the daily schedule of the route, McBride said.

The AVL software will then provide a predicted arrival time for the bus. When there aren’t GPS coordinates showing the live location of the bus – either because it’s broken, or because the bus never left the garage – the RTPI will simply show the time the bus is scheduled to arrive.

To avoid this, cancelled services have to be manually removed from the RTPI, says McBride. “Each [bus] operator is responsible for marking a service as cancelled and they vary all the time in how diligent they are at doing this,” he says.

Dublin Bus hasn’t responded to a query sent Monday asking what the reasons are that staff there wouldn’t remove a bus from the RTPI system.

The “NTA continues to work closely with the bus operators to ensure that they are cancelling services on the real time system in a timely manner”, an NTA spokesperson said.

Fixing the problem

Back in 2021, the NTA put a call out to companies that might be interested in replacing this AVL software.

A procurement document said the company that won the contract would bring in a new national automatic vehicle location system that “could be used by any NTA licenced bus operator on any part of the island of Ireland”.

This would include replacing Dublin Bus’s AVL system, which services 1,000 buses and has been in operation since 2010, the document says.

Plus setting up “A hosted back office to process the information and circulate it to the relevant channels, e.g. the national journey planner, RTPI …”.

And  “The management of planned and unplanned disruptions such that information can be provided almost in real-time to drivers and bus passengers,” the document says.

The new system should also include “A prediction generator that makes use of modern machine learning/AI algorithms to make increasingly accurate predictions taking into account a range of historic and current operational data and that will distribute predictions of bus arrivals to NTA channels”, the document says.

The NTA’s contract for the new bus AVL system should also have a method of counting how many passengers get on and off a bus, “to assist with capacity management along with some additional functionality that will help increase accessibility of the bus network, such as wheelchair sensors”, the document says.

It should also have “A method of providing real-time AVL data to urban traffic control systems to facilitate bus priority at traffic signals,” the document says.

And there should be diagnostic tools to help analyse and improve services, it says.

A solution?

In December 2023, the NTA announced that it had awarded the contract to Trapeze.

The new system will “enable the production of high quality dynamic real time information for public transport customers through our real time application (TFI Live), our 800+ On-Street Displays and our real-time data exports to third party applications”, an NTA press release said at that time.

It is “designed to deliver operational savings by unifying all bus services under a single system, while enhancing the passenger experience through greater accuracy and consistency of passenger information, and reduced waiting and overall journey times”, according to a press release from Trapeze.

The plan is for the NTA and Trapeze to roll out the new AVL system on Dublin Bus, Go Ahead and Bus Éireann buses first, NTA chief executive Anne Graham told the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Transport and Communications in July.

“But we have a module in there of what we are calling AVL light, which can be attached to the ticketing system on the Local Link bus services,” Graham said. “It will just take some time and will be later in that contract delivery.”

Having an AVL system that can give reliable information on whether and when a bus will actually show up is key to getting more people to use buses, the NTA said in one of its procurement documents for the contract.

Without it, “public transport would be less attractive, resulting in less patronage, less revenue and a shift towards private car use”, it says. “This would lead to an increase in congestion and a worsening of local air quality at a time when the focus should be on making an improvement.”