With the Carris app not working for months, some people have created solutions

At a Carris stop near the São Pedro de Alcântara viewpoint, we take our cell phones out of our pockets to see when the next bus or streetcar passes by. The official Carris app, launched with an extensive communication campaign in 2018, gives us waiting times that seem to match reality: the 758 showed up more or less when the app told us it would, as did the 24E, but there was a 19B that didn't come.

We open Google Maps, select the same stop and check that the waiting times are different - Google's service uses Carris' timetables to give us the waiting times, which makes it not always correspond to reality. We use Carris' SMS service to check if the information that appears on Carris' app is actually correct and we realize that it is: the real time waiting times that the SMS service gives us correspond to those shown on Carris' app. app.

For some months now, Carris' application has not been working and several passengers have been sending questions and complaints to Lisboa Para Pessoasespecially during this back-to-school and back-to-work period. Launched in 2018 with some pomp and circumstance - that is, with a communication campaign in the mix -, the Carris app now allows passengers to know how long it will take to catch their bus in real time. This real-time information was first made available on the Carris app and also in the form of an API, so that other apps - such as Google Maps, Moovit or Citymapper - could also present it to their users.

Carris does not answer

Lisbon for People contacted Carris on September 14 to find out what happened to their app, why it stopped working, and if a fix was planned. No answer has been received so far. This week, in a meeting with a group of citizens, Lisbon's Mayor, Carlos Moedas, said that the Carris app was already operational again - in other words, the real time schedules would be back.

Lisboa Para Pessoas proved that it does, but not in every stop. Back to the Miradouro de São Pedro de Alcântara, where we spent many minutes testing the app and checking if the buses and streetcars were actually showing up when they were supposed to, we decided to try the opposite stop to the one we were at. A service like Carris has always two directions and, if at stop 10602 "Ascensor da Glória" we had real time schedules, at stop 10601 "Ascensor da Glória", on the opposite side, no information appeared, indicating the following warning: "No hourly information."

This same warning appeared, until recently, for all Carris stops. In Google's app store, the Play StoreCarris' application has more than 100 thousand downloads to date and an evaluation of 1.5 stars in five. Since at least March 2022 there has been an accumulation of messages from users dissatisfied with the inability to consult timetables in real time. "This application really is good but only when it is working, the problem is that it has not been working for quite a few months."one user complains. "The app is just to take up space in the phone's memory"says someone else. "I used to use and try to use the application but lately with no success, no matter how hard I try to get results nothing appears or if it does appear it is limited to a few stops and some times, I am sorry because I used to use it very often"identifies a passenger. "I have uninstalled and re-installed...and nothing. I hope they fix the problem so I can get back to good use."says another user, perhaps more hopeful.

The Android version has not received any updates since 2020. The iOS app, on the other hand, was updated after two years on August 23 with "general optimizations and bug fixes." At App Store, Apple's app store, Carris has a similar rating - 1.6 stars out of five - and the comments we can find are similar.

API unavailable

The main utility of the Carris app was even the provision of real-time information - data that the municipal operator, managed by the Lisbon City Council since 2017, has in its possession, which it does not make available in its app and which it no longer gives to third parties. Not only did the Carris application stop working, but the operator's API with the real time data was also unavailable months ago. With that, no app can now show how long a bus or streetcar is actually missing in Lisbon. With that also, technological platforms that people have voluntarily developed, such as transport.live or the GeoBuswhich showed the location of the vehicles in real time, are no longer operational. The Lisbon Metro, on the other hand, makes its API openly available - that's why services like Google Maps, Moovit or Citymapper show real-time information; and that's also why, in the community of transport enthusiasts, the following are born webapps which simply indicate how much time is left until the next meter or sites that quantify, analyze, and document service failures over years.

Frederico Duarte, 43 years old, university lecturersent a complaint to Carris, which he shared with Lisboa Para Pessoas. Accuses the municipal operator of harming its passengers by not "provide service in a transparent, accessible and scrutinizable manner"by restricting access to its API - which was once public. Frederico believes that there was a "decision by the company's management to make its API private"making it impossible for "outside entities would not make public the many delays and inconsistencies in service". "Moreover, decisions like this perpetuate a lack of trust in the public transport service, which leads to an erosion in its reputation and consequent user disinclination to not only use public transport but to defend it against private and individual transport."believes the academic. If the API was public - as the Metro's is, for example - even if the Carris app stopped working properly, other apps would still show the actual bus waiting times.

At the mercy of SMS and e-mail

The app's malfunction could be explained by an apparent neglect of its maintenance. But for a number of passengers, especially the younger ones - who now have a free "Navegante" pass in Lisbon if they are students and residents in the city -, public transportation cannot function disconnected from technology. This is the case of Reuben, 19, a university student, who likes to take public transport with an app in his pocket. In the beginning, it was Moovit because it was the "only application with AML's transports integrated in one place". When Carris started to provide on its app the real time schedules, it says that it began "gaining more confidence to ride the bus instead of just the subway". "At the time, it was revolutionary for me because private carriers, such as Vimeca and Rodoviária de Lisboa, did not - and do not - make this information available"he says. Speaks in "degradation" of the Carris service and says that "already almost" missed exams "for missing the bus". "Catching buses at stops that are not terminals become a big dice game - especially if you are in a hurry because the only way to know is through the SMS system."says the young student. "I've already missed buses because of this Russian roulette. This is aggravated at rush hour, in the busy traffic making the buses unpredictable. Without real-time information, I don't get wired at intermediate stops and always look for the terminals.“

Miguel Fazenda, 23, also a student, does not commute by bus every day, "but every time I do it is quite useful for me to know the waiting time until the bus arrives, because then I can know if it is worth leaving home right away, for example"he says. "With the Carris app I could consult it, but now this one rarely works"he laments. Miguel started to use the SMS service, which consists in sending a written message to the number 3599 with the following structure: "C (space) Stop Code". The cost is that of a normal SMS, so depending on the user's tariff can be paid or not. "Since in my fare plan you are charged for SMS to get the waiting time from Carris, I started using the email service that the company also provides." The e-mail service is similar: you need to write "C (space) Stop Code" in the subject field and send it to sms@carris.pt. The stop code is on the yellow stop signs. In a short time, you receive an SMS or e-mail reply with the waiting times for the next lines.

For considering SMS and e-mail service "very impractical"Due to the non-functioning of Carris' application, Miguel Fazenda developed a very simple webapp. Informally baptized as "Carris alternative to SMS", and hosted at rail-app.freemyip.comthis small site allows you to type the number of a stop and get in a few seconds the updated waiting times of the lines that pass by there. What the platform does is, the user sends an e-mail to Carris through the official e-mail (sms@carris.pt) and returns the information received in a simple interface.

Miguel shared his work with Lisbon Community for Peopleand has, therefore, already made some improvements to his little webappIt is also possible to add stops to favorites - because people are not always near the stop to know its number. The 23-year-old knows that his work is just a patch, and everyone's wish is that Carris will fix its application problem and make its API publicly available again - because from that API can come innovative platforms and disruptive ideas, like the ones you can get to know herebut also data analysis with a playful or even journalistic content.

In a reply to a complaint, to which Lisboa Para Pessoas had access, Carris informed that "regarding Carris App performance, we continue to work to mitigate temporary information instability periods, distributed throughout the day". He adds that is being implemented "a solution that will mitigate the underlying problem, for this we are preparing a technological evolution of our infrastructure for greater scalability and resilience, with this implementation we believe we will be able to accommodate the more than one million daily requests that are made to our infrastructure by customers and partner applications".

Update at 12:30 pm on 9/20/2022: added a response from Carris to a passenger complaint with details about the future of the application.