...or, how I suffered at the hands of the ambiguous authority behind a flashing LED display and decided to speak truth to power (or AC Transit)...

Last night I had a chance to participate in a monthly ritual that has been ongoing since the inception of the Class Pass program in 1999: the Class Pass Advisory Committee.

Over the course of two hours representatives of the UC Berkeley Graduate Assembly, students such as myself who had pressing questions, and UC administrative officials got to ask representatives of AC Transit questions about campus bus service. Well, it wasn't all about putting AC Transit on the hotseat. First we heard from an AC transit rep about a new system of bus rapid transit (involving dedicated bus lanes from Oakland to Berkeley), and then there were some congenial negotiations about the start date for the inclusion of 25% graduate student employees in the employee parking pass program, and the prospects for a pre-tax BART ticket purchasing program.

Then, the good stuff: we got to put questions to three AC Transit Transportation Planners and one AC Transit Marketer. One undergraduate rep had questions about the locations of bus stops near the dorms, a rep from UC Village had questions about service on the 18 and 52L. I had questions about the 1 Rapid International. After we got those line-specific issues addressed, 90 minutes into the meeting I finally got to ask:

"So what is NextBus?"

I explained how the previous evening I had sat at the UC Loop bus stop for 30 minutes while the Nextbus.com sign flashed its promise of a bus 10 then 5 then 2 minutes out, only to switch to the bus being 20 minutes out. Finally, a bus came and sped on past, on its way to the garage. I took BART home.

The AC Transit transportation planner Puja Sarna reacted with a somewhat horrified look, and had me repeat and clarify what I said. "The bus was never listed as 'arriving,' it would just switch from 2 minutes out to 20 minutes out."

Turns out, at that time the bus line had just stopped running for the day. There was no paper schedule posted in the bus stop, and so anyone happening by could be snared by the amber flashing lights with their empty promise of a warm, fast bus home. The long answer to why there is no schedule posted in the plexiglass box installed clearly for that purpose doesn't bear repeating: let's just say it involves a buy-out by Clearchannel.

So what is NextBus?

She explained that it is a sophisticated combination of GPS signals from the buses themselves and predictive arrival times based on historical data of past travel times. It sounded fancy, and in fact the web site has an impressive cartoon flow chart explaining its genius. Puja was at a loss to explain why the sign would keep promising a bus when the line was finished running for the day.

We left the meeting together, and as we walked to the bus stop, she told me that she once worked in that division ...and was increasingly grateful she had been transferred.

So now you know-- sometimes NextBus is a high-tech real-time predictor of bus arrivals, sometimes a piece of public installation art, projecting fictions in an official way... like an experiment in public faith. I think even the saltiest of us secretly wants to believe the word of public authority.

AC Transit ought to rent those LED displays to Jenny Holzer in the bus lines' off hours. She is the go-to girl for fooling around with the anonymous voice of authority projected in lights.

A short video of Holzer's LED art / experiment displaying text from her famous and controversial work Truisms over an elevator in a public building.