Bus didn't show up in Cork? There's an app for that.
No-Show Bus Cork is a new tracker designed by Sasha Mitichkin, a student at MTU. He plans to share the data with Bus Éireann and the NTA to help make "ghost buses" a thing of the past.
There’s an app for everything, even for things you wish didn’t need to exist.
To that list, add No-Show Bus Cork, a tracker app which gathers data exclusively on buses that fail to show up at their designated times and stops across Cork city.
Developed by Sasha Mitichkin, a 20-year-old student from Ukraine studying software development at Munster Technological University, in the space of 24 hours, the purpose of the app is to gather user data and feed it back to Bus Éireann in Cork and the National Transport Authority (NTA).
The idea to build the tracker came from a post on a Cork subreddit, where people were pointing out that Dublin had two such trackers, but Cork had none, Mitichkin said.
And so, this past weekend, over the space of 24 hours, with some help from AI, Mitichkin rectified that and created No-Show Bus Cork. The tracker is open-source, meaning anyone can have a look at the data and how it was put together.
How does it work? Well, you don’t need to be a computer scientist to use it. Simply add the bus number, date, time, and any optional information, and hit submit.
The app has only been live since Sunday, 9 February, but already the 220 and 215 buses are outperforming other routes.
Mitichkin said the driving force behind No-Show Bus Cork is to “gather data, then analyse it, and help Bus Éireann improve the service.”
“Right now, we can see the 215 and the 220 are the most reported, so we might show this to Bus Éireann.”
Mitichkin said he’s working on the data analytics side of things, but he plans on compiling reports to show that people do have legitimate complaints, and not just on Reddit. He’s also happy to share the data with Bus Éireann’s data team, but as it’s open source anyone can take a look under the hood.
No-Show Bus Cork borrows heavily, or was inspired by, No-Show Bus Tracker in Dublin a project set up by the Dublin Inquirer news team.
Sam Tranum, editor of Dublin Inquirer, said he was delighted that Mitichkin has made a Cork version, adding what’s even better is his version is “open-source, so people in other cities in Ireland can set up their own local ghost-bus trackers.
“For me, these trackers are a way to highlight problems in bus services as they appear, so users can band together push operators to improve.
They're also a way to gather data independently on bus reliability, so journalists and others can verify (or not) NTA and bus-operator reliability claims about reliability -- and look for patterns, like, if a particular company is particularly bad, or a specific route has major problems,” Tranum said.
Mitichkin came to Cork three years ago from Ukraine; he’s originally from Lugansk, which has been occupied by Russian forces since 2014. He had little to no English when he arrived in Ireland, other than knowledge of a lot of Eminem lyrics. While he said his first year here was tough, since starting his degree, he’s become more settled. Currently, he’s enrolled in an internship, and “it’s going great.”
Since moving to Cork, Mitichkin’s had plenty of experience of taking the bus, especially the 208 bus to and from work.
“I was always struggling to get to work on time when I took the bus,” he told Tripe + Drisheeen.
Likewise, after work he would wait at the nearest stop, but invariably if a bus didn’t come, he would walk to the next stop, “and see if I can catch a bus there, and then the next stop, and then I would end up walking the forty minutes home, and that was faster than a bus.”
You need to allow yourself a lot of time if you’re taking the bus in Cork, Mitichkin said.
“For a small town it’s just kind of ridiculous.”
Data released to Sinn Féin TD Thomas Gould under an FOI request last year showed that while 58% of Cork city buses were on time, 35% of them arrived late. A further 7% left a stop early, with approximately 10% of scheduled kilometres not operated at all between January 1 and June 30 of 2024.
According to a press release from Cllr Joe Lynch, Sinn Féin, released this week, Leap card validators are to be installed on the right hand side of buses in Cork this coming April/May, which could help reduce boarding time.
Bus Connects Cork, a €600 million multi-agency plan headed by the NTA to vastly improve the bus network, was launched in 2022 with rounds of public consultations.
Council calls for controversial Bus Connects plan to go "back to the drawing board."
A strongly worded motion calling on Cork City Council to “reject” the National Transport Authority’s controversial Bus Connects plan for Cork was proposed by five Fianna Fáil councillors at Cork City Council’s meeting on Monday night.
Bravo Sasha, well done.
Hope this contributes to an improvement in service.