Riders waiting for the bus on Baltimore St. in May.

Last month, the Maryland Transit Administration launched an online performance dashboard, which shows the reliability of each of its 60 plus bus routes for the last year.

It’s an impressive tool, created after years of Transportation Alliance and other advocates calling on MTA to make its reliability data public and filing numerous Public Information Act requests.

The dashboard’s strength is that you can search for performance data by bus route and any date range going back to April 1, 2018, and automatically view the data in chart and table formats. You can do a year-over-year comparison or see how reliable the bus was two weeks ago and look at the data at a more granular level.

MTA’s Performance Dashboard, queried on July 23.

For example, the data shows the recent water main break in Baltimore on July 9 caused MTA’s downtown July 9 bus reliability to tank:

38% on time for the CityLink Brown

41% on time for the CityLink Yellow

42% on time for the CityLink Navy

49% on time for the CityLink Red

55% on time for the CityLink Orange

Together, these five lines provide approximately 43,000 rides every weekday. Anecdotally, we know that the water main break’s impact on bus reliability was severe.

The dashboard data confirms it — in detail.

On July 10, a sinkhole swallowed the Light Rail platform at the Baltimore Convention Center station, closing parts of Pratt and Howard streets. Bus reliability continued to crater, with some routes averaging 50 to 60 percent late.

Sure, the dashboard has a few minor weaknesses, namely a two-week lag time for data. It also doesn’t include bus speed, frequency, or ridership by date, as Greater Boston’s MBTA and San Antonio’s VIA do. Nor does it document service cancellations (MTA doesn’t count no-shows as part of its reliability calculations) or allow users to export their data. But for now, for MTA’s first effort, it’s handy and fast and surpasses what most mid-sized transit agencies have made available, and MTA promises more data is coming.

If you’re not interested in a deep dive, you can track performance year over year and see which routes are trending better or not improving at all.

The CityLink Lime, a route that serves Northwest Hospital to Harbor East, has improved dramatically in the last year comparing June 2018 to June 2019, increasing from 65 to 73 percent on time; so has the CityLink Purple (Johns Hopkins Hospital to Catonsville) from 58 to 67 percent on time.

The dashboard also shows bus lines that continue to struggle, most notably MTA’s CityLink Red, a major route that serves the York Road corridor and downtown. It’s also MTA’s most popular route.

The Red’s punctuality averaged 60% in May of 2019 (about the same as it did in 2018) and 63% for June 2019— with 8 days averaging between 50–60% on time.

That’s simply not a reliable ride if you’re trying to get to work. Or get anywhere.

Screenshot of MTA Performance Dashboard taken on July 24.

What kind of service is Baltimore getting when on an average day 30–35 percent of the buses on MTA’s most popular route don’t show up on time — this despite two years of investments in transit signal priority, five miles of dedicated bus lanes, new schedules and the most generous on-time performance standard in the country?

Is this a matter of funding, equipment, staffing, planning, procurement, or traffic enforcement? Most likely, all the above. If you care about mobility in greater Baltimore, this is an important question to ask and get answered.

But there’s more to it. To be fair, if we’re going to use the dashboard to call out MTA for late buses, we need to also call out local governments that control streets, that enforce (or don’t enforce) dedicated bus lanes — and neglect their infrastructure.

Site of the sinkhole and the Baltimore Convention Center Light Rail platform collapse on July 25.

To be clear, the MTA is not the only one on the hook for Baltimore’s unreliable bus service.

For our part, the Transportation Alliance intends to use MTA’s performance dashboard to watchdog service and reliability, to document improvements, to advocate for increased funding, and build political will for greater investment, and call out local governments who don’t support it.

We call on other advocates, riders, and elected officials to do the same.

Now that we have the data, let’s put it to good use.