January-February Link Reductions

25 Replies to “January-February Link Reductions”

1. The schedule is already getting worse on the first day. Link is down to 30-35 minutes due to “maintenance activity”, and next-arrival displays may be inaccurate due to “scheduling issues”. So nothing else is new: these kind of things happened during earlier maintenance periods. By the time you read this, it may be fixed or different.

   1. There’s some good news here – Link is safe from mechanical issues, signal issues, power issues, maintenance, and fill-in-the-blank issues every day from 1AM – 4AM! In theory that’s so Sound Transit can do maintenance, but apparently they do maintenance whenever they feel like it these days.

      I’m really glad that when we were looking for places to live, we chose a place close to the E Line rather than Link, since Metro actually seems to understand that it’s a transit agency with actual customers rather than a capital projects agency pretending to run transit.

   2. OneBusAway claims Link is now running every 15-20 minutes, if you trust it.

   3. I just don’t understand why in 2025 it’s so hard to provide accurate arrival information to riders even during special service periods. Update the schedules with the temporary reduced service schedule during its period… its all electronic. As long as the departing train time from the terminal is provided by Sound Transit for real time arrival, real time arrival should be able to figure out the rest the line.

      1. I don’t either. I’m not sure anyone reading the blog does. I am a retired software engineer and I used to know a little about some hardware (especially modems — lot of good that does me) but I know nothing about the hardware and issues involved with sending and receiving the information necessary to make the updates. For that matter I don’t know much about the software but I doubt that is the problem.

      2. Software always works perfectly, didn’t you know that?

         Maybe they need to go to the next release of the operating system.

      3. If Sound Transit and Metro don’t know how the errors are originating, how can we?

      4. Knowing why would require an “anonymous unnamed inside source”.

         Personally, I think it’s the pointy-haired guy.

      5. @Jim Cusick,

         “ Software always works perfectly, didn’t you know that?”

         You are right, software does always work perfectly. At least by the standards of the software industry. And those standards are pretty darn low.

         Think of it: The blue screen of death? The spinning wheel of despair? The Black Death? All perfectly fine in the software industry. Even when very frequent.

         But in transportation? With a couple of hundred people onboard? Or maybe a thousand people? Nope. And telling the end user to simply “reboot” is not an acceptable “solution” to a transportation issue.

         And pushing a half finished product out into the user environment and letting the users “beta test” it for you is not acceptable. In addition to being nothing less than just lazy.

         Na. There is a reason that real brick and mortar transportation development is so hard. Because the standards need to be very high.

      6. I’m more concerned that operations keep the trains moving safely, and the crossing gate software/electronics work flawlessly.

         The arrival time display issues can be annoying, but I’m not worried if it isn’t at the top of the list.

         I adapt my schedule for any delays regardless of the mode.

         We accept drive time delays, ferry delays, flight delays, but somehow transit is expected to operate flawlessly.

      7. @Jim Cusick,

         “ We accept drive time delays, ferry delays, flight delays, but somehow transit is expected to operate flawlessly.”

         I agree, but I would add bus delays to your list of delays that we somehow accept. Nobody expects their bus to be exactly on time. And in reality they are only on time about 80% of the time, which isn’t very good.

         But with real mass transit it is not about being tolerant of delays, it is about safety.

         With a bus going out of service you can usually just evacuate the 20 or so passengers onto the curb, or worst case onto the street. But with a train carrying a few hundred (or more) passengers? In a tunnel? Or on an elevated structure? Not so easy. And access for emergency services isn’t so easy either.

         So the standard for real mass transit has to be much higher. It’s not about tolerating delays, it’s about passenger safety.

      8. The trains are being run safely.

      9. Jim, we’re spending tens of billions of dollars on a rail network that should have a minimum of 10 minute headways on each of its branches, not just for frequency but for capacity. We’re getting something that regularly only has worse than 30 minute headways even at peak times, when we really need that capacity, and worse than that is completely unplanned. People are being told that they’ll be able to transfer to and from transfer Link easily from buses, which generally are much less frequent, so each one of these delays compounds those transfer penalties and makes transit unusable for a lot of people.

         Sound Transit needs to address this and address it now to avoid spoiling both their good will with the public, and the good will of every other transit agency that thought they could depend on them.

      10. And my responses are in answer to poncho’s complaint about the real time train status board.

          After having worked for 25 years as a programmer (way back in the before [Y2K] days,) I’m more amused at the people who think all this $#!T is supposed to work perfectly.

          It never did back then, and it’s actually worse now.

          I can only surmise that there are other issues ST’s IT people are concentrating on.

      11. If you look closely at OneBusAway, you can blue trains about 15-20 minutes apart, punctuated by grey “scheduled arrivals” in between. View details, the blue trains show up as anywhere from 2 to 22 minutes late, but they’re relatively consistently spaced. My theory is that the blue trains actually represent real trains transmitting real-time information, and they are actually on time, relative to the reduced schedule; the problem is simply OneBusAway being confused about what the schedule is, even though it actually knows where the trains are. The grey trains are, of course, pure phantom.

      12. Both Link trains and Metro buses are prone to bursts of errors and outages in the next-arrival displays and transit-app information. Both ST Metro sent out alerts in the past week saying their displays may be unreliable. The station displays can be turned off when they’re too inaccurate or there’s no data, but the apps can’t, so the apps are either wrong or show “Scheduled” times.

          This indicates the issue is not just Link but the larger data-gathering system. It may be “software” or it may be the physical transponders transmission wires or radio-reception holes. We know that bus workers sometimes forget to turn on the transponders when the bus leaves the base in the morning, so the bus doesn’t report all day. With Link it could be any of these or something we haven’t thought of. ST did testing last year to try to pinpoint the source of the errors, but apparently it couldn’t fully.

          At least the system is accurate a lot of the time for Link, including between its outages once a month or so. It’s better than if ST just turned it off for several months as somebody had incorrectly reported it had done.

      13. How come pantograph, transsee, etc. can provide very accurate tracking and arrival estimates when ST can’t even get their screens working half the time?
          Honestly forget PIMS and use the data that the websites mentioned above? Or does ST already do?

      14. Is Pantograph more accurate than the official data?

          Every app company has its own algorithm for guessing what the missing data and errors mean is going on based on previous experience with those errors. Some apps are better than others at it. That could be what Pantograph is doing. I don’t see how it can have a more reliable source of what bus is where than Metro or ST can. That would mean Pantograph has its own network of transponders and cameras everywhere that Metro and ST don’t know about. That’s hard to imagine: how could a third-party company make such a large investment in hardware and communications, or put its own transponders on agency-owned buses and city-owned streets?

      15. @Mike

          > That’s hard to imagine: how could a third-party company make such a large investment in hardware and communications, or put its own transponders on agency-owned buses and city-owned streets?

          Actually there’s a pretty simple one. Your cell phone if you have the app can track the vehicles. The “Transit App” uses that to help improve their algorithm. (as in https://apps.apple.com/mt/app/transit-live-bus-tube-times/id498151501 not transit apps in general)

          Though I checked and I don’t think pantograph using such tracking.

      16. > Honestly forget PIMS and use the data that the websites mentioned above? Or does ST already do?

          It’s around 3.5 tiers of data

          1) GTFS scheduled data. this is just the time table
          2) GTFS real time data => most providers just directly use this. sound transit vehicles output some position to a server that is then fetched by most apps
          2b) GTFS real time data corrected. Sometimes sound transit outputs incorrect information. It can be corrected by the app.

          For an example for pantograph https://pantographapp.com/help

          > Some agencies report “fake” vehicle IDs, meaning the vehicle ID in the feed doesn’t match the actual fleet number of the vehicle. Usually, though, the “fake” ID is tied to that particular coach, so with a lot of time in the field we can link each “fake” ID to a “real” ID. This has been done with Everett Transit in Puget Sound and Tri Delta Transit in the San Francisco Bay Area.

          3) Live tracking bus/train riders. Other apps if they have enough people can directly track the bus/train through the app and have their own parallel data. though it is hard for it to work correctly underground

          Most of the time how the other apps are better is usually just 2b though due to fixing small errors or guessing vehicle positions.

      17. “Actually there’s a pretty simple one. Your cell phone if you have the app can track the vehicles.”

          Pantograph has a car following every one of thousands of bus vehicles? Otherwise how can one person’s cell phone track all the buses, and what would the person be doing all day?

      18. One of the points of data that is shown on PDXBus is when it was last located.

          Eg: if the bus was last located 23 seconds ago, the location data should be ok. If the GPS system last got a signal from the bus 7 minutes ago, I’m better off using the scheduled time (it shows both estimated and scheduled).

          One of the problems with Link is that it has tunnels, and next arrival software uses GPS. GPS signals don’t work in tunnels. I can watch the symbol for every MAX train sit at Goose Hollow for about 8 minutes, then get magically teleported to Cedar Hills Transit Center.

          Sure, you should be able to use block occupancy detectors to locate the train in the tunnel. The companies providing the next arrival systems in the USA don’t offer that.

      19. First I explicitly said pantograph does not use such tracking but “Transit App” does. It’s a separate app/company.

          Secondly no it cannot track every vehicle just if someone is in it. It’s not too complicated just if someone selects to use a vehicle and then begins to move along the path of the same route it’s pretty simple to guess that they are on the bus.

          Aka rider A from mt baker chooses route 7 navigation. Their location then shows them moving north along rainier Ave — you can probably guess it’s the bus

2. Well I guess I’m happy that I decided to take a coach bus up to Everett next weekend from Tacoma.

3. Crossing my fingers that all this work is completed by the time Revive I-5: North starts up.

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