New Bus Safety App Is As Clear As a Blind Curve in a Fogbank

A new app released by the U.S. Department of Transportation this week is designed to let riders view bus companies’ safety records – but the wealth of information is largely undecipherable, an issue for riders in a city like New York that is a major hub of the booming bus industry.

The information on SaferBus is pulled from records kept by The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. The spokeswoman said the agency is restrained by regulation from presenting its safety data in a way that clearly compares carriers.

“Unfortunately at this point, we can’t rate," she said. "If the rider wants to know good or bad, that’s not where the agency is yet.”

Consequently, it can be difficult to make sense of the data presented from search results.

A search on the SaferBus app for the popular long-distance carrier Bolt Bus, for example, calls up no results.  A spokeswoman for U.S. DOT said the app does in fact have safety data on Bolt Bus – but riders need to know the company is owned by Greyhound or have Bolt Bus's seven-digit DOT number in order to find it.  

When searching for Megabus, a result pops up immediately. Five safety categories appear. The first one, Unsafe Driving, indicates that the U.S. DOT's "intervention threshold" is 50 percent, and that the Megabus "on-road performance" number is 4.5 percent. What is less clear is whether that’s good or bad.

It turns out that it's good, according to the footnotes – yes, footnotes – that define the "percentiles range" of the agency's Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories (BASIC).

Tyson Evans, deputy editor for interactive news at The New York Times, gave SaferBus a test drive and then talked about how good apps work.

"You have to come up with some kind of headline that says, 'Compared to everyone else, they're doing really well or really poorly,'” he said. "You have to have the context without cluttering it with endlessly footnoted explanations."

SaferBus is an in-house government production; the U.S. DOT and The Volpe Center, another federal transportation agency, helped design the app.  

By contrast, the city’s MTA does not design its own apps using data such as train and bus schedules. Instead, the authority opens the code to third-party developers, who have created dozens of apps that tend to be user-friendly. There are 51 apps and counting in the authority's App Center.

U.S. DOT communications director Candice Tolliver said the agency plans to eventually follow the lead of the MTA.

"Later this year, the agency will participate in a federal government challenge program that gives app developers access to the raw data used to make SaferBus an effective safety tool," she said.

The release of the DOT data comes at time of heightened concern about bus safety after a series of high-profile crashes in the past year, including an accident in the Bronx last March that killed 14 passengers.