Making sense of detours: how Transit app improved the customer experience when service doesn’t go as planned

Target Audience: The primary audience for improved detours information is transit riders. Bus detours, whether planned or unplanned, can be one of the most frustrating experiences for riders — particularly if they are unaware of or unable to understand changes to their route. This feature empowers them with better information. The secondary audience is transit agencies, which often have limited tools to efficiently and clearly communicate this information to riders, requiring considerable resources and planning. This includes text-based service alerts entered through a data feed —which are often difficult to decipher for riders, do not visually communicate complex changes, and are not reflected in trip plans presented to riders.

Strategy Objective:Transit's strategy was to improve the way detours are communicated to riders. There are two ways this information flows to riders. The first approach uses machine learning to detect and display both planned and unplanned detours as they happen, integrating the new path and stops into route information and the trip planner, making detours visible and actionable to riders without any agency intervention required. The second approach allows agencies to enter detours into their real-time data feeds with service providers Swiftly and Vontas. In both cases, the data is published using the new GTFS-TripModifications standard for use by other communication channels — including agency websites, such as that of Montreal's STM. Detours are now live in 10 cities, including Las Vegas and Baltimore.

Situation Challenge: Parades. Marathons. Protests. Roadwork. Water main breaks. Four-alarm fires. Sometimes detours are planned. Sometimes they pop up haphazardly. Either way, transit agencies are often forced to scramble together an alternate route. Riders waiting at the stop are lucky to get a temporary sign taped to the bus shelter. What about the app? They might notice a service alert announcing the detour — but it's usually just an inscrutable block of text. It's also a universal problem for riders: Transit's research showed that up to 15% of bus routes can be detoured in US and Canadian cities at any time.

Results Impact: Transit's first deployment of its new detour feature was with Montreal's STM, where lack of information about frequent detours was the single biggest customer complaint. Following the pilot launch, the STM did user field testing to test the feature's effectiveness. In a May 2023 survey, the STM found that 74% of surveyed riders reported feeling more confident in their bus network, with 38% feeling very confident as a result. The probability that users use detour information in the future was extraordinarily high, at 89%. Actual usage of this feature was also proven out with over 35% of Transit's monthly app users in the Montreal area (over 100,000 unique transit riders) accessing information or planning a trip on a line where detours were active.

Why Submit: Improving detour information is an important innovation in the customer experience, and which we expect will become widely adopted by transit agencies and additional technology providers over time. This effort is a natural evolution of the GTFS revolution that made real-time passenger information universally available in popular apps, particularly because this data is being designed to follow the GTFS data standard. Multiple studies have proven that high quality real-time information is instrumental in increasing transit ridership and customer satisfaction, and efforts to make that information even more comprehensive and accurate are crucial.