Improved real-time bus and rail information is now available  on the Transit app, Metro’s official trip-planning app for smartphones. Here are the links to get Transit for iPhones and for Android phones.

As part of the upgrades, canceled bus and rail trips are now displayed in the app. While Metro continues to run the vast majority of its trips, we’ve had some staff issues due to a national labor shortage — which is impacting many transit agencies — and the ongoing surge in the COVID-19 Omicron variant.

We want riders to be well-informed when their trip isn’t going to occur as planned. When Metro must cancel a trip, the cancellation is shown in the Transit app with a strikethrough to let riders know that the trip will not be running, eliminating “ghost buses” — i.e. buses that show up in the app but are not actually running.

Here’s an example of what a canceled trip looks like in the app:

The improved real-time info is available thanks to a company named Swiftly that now supplies data to Metro. Swiftly updates vehicle locations every 11 seconds and supplies real-time data to many agencies in the transit industry.