We don't let them. WMATA publishes its own bus scorecard; we score every DC Metrobus route from the same real-time data — independently, in the open, measured against what actually happened. Not the schedule, and not a number the agency grades itself.
Transit agencies report on-time performance with generous windows, measured only at a handful of timepoints. By that math, a route can look fine while riders live a different reality: buses that bunch and then leave a twenty-minute gap, ghost buses that never come, silent detours that skip your stop.
None of that shows up in the official scorecard. It shows up in your morning.
Expected wait. The honest headline: how long you actually wait at a stop you arrive at randomly, once bunching and gaps are accounted for. Not half the scheduled headway — the real number, which is almost always worse.
Detour transparency. When a bus leaves its route, we say so and show it, instead of quietly snapping it back onto a line it isn't following.
The benchmark. Every day, on every route, we log the agency's own arrival predictions alongside ours and grade both against the same ground truth we reconstruct — independently, and in the open. There's no way to ask after the fact what was predicted last month, so this record exists only because we've kept it from day one. We hold ourselves to the standard we hold them to.
Know which routes are reliable and which will leave you standing — before you plan your trip around one.
Independent, methodology-transparent evidence of how service actually performs, route by route, over time.
An enriched reliability data layer — segment travel times, ground-truth arrivals, detour history — available programmatically.
We read the same public GTFS and GTFS-Realtime feeds anyone can access. We reconstruct ground truth ourselves by map-matching every bus to its route, derive when it really reached each stop, and score predictions against that. Nothing proprietary is taken on faith — including our own numbers, which are graded in the open.
Independent · derived from GTFS-Realtime · not affiliated with WMATA.