Readers have shared with the Herald correspondence they've sent to King County Metro regarding malfunctioning signage at bus stops in West Seattle since the changeover to RapidRide. Despite multiple complaints about it, the problems have persisted.

One letter reads:

"This is the fifth day in a row where the arrival signs at Morgan Junction station state "refer to schedule."

Either fix this or provide published schedules or get OneBusAway fixed, or all three.

This is 6 weeks since this service rolled out one year behind the original schedule and it's still in a massive failure mode.

As a tax payer and transit user this continues to be completely unacceptable."

And Metro's reply:
The goal of the Rapid Ride is to have a type of service that passengers can show up at a stop and we provide you with a bus, not to ask you to wait for any particular bus. There has been a great effort to make the timing between buses consistent. The schedule data that King County provided to One Bus Away (OBA) showed buses coming at a fixed intervals. After we provided the data we found out that although OBA was able to display the schedule information they were not able to use the schedule information to match to the real time information. King County has a three pronged approach to addressing the issues with OBA.

1. One Bus Away is upgrading their servers to handle the increased load.
2. As a short term fix King County changed the schedule data format so that OBA could track individual buses and provide real time updates. That data should be available OBA soon, my hope is next week.
3. I expect to help OBA handle the bus schedule data to reflect the way that the service is actually scheduled and managed.

Then today Metro shared this note with the Herald:
A quick note on the RapidRide real-time signs at California and Fauntleroy (Morgan Junction). They have power and connectivity, but are not yet showing accurate information at all times. We apologize for the confusion this is causing. We're trying to fix the problem as fast as possible, and are troubleshooting several issues. We will keep you posted on progress and thanks for your patience.

Jeff Switzer
Communications
King County Department of Transportation