A "technical anomaly" is affecting the waiting times on the Blue Line. While it is not solved, Metro de Lisboa deactivated this information in the stations. The situation has been dragging on for several months.
The Lisbon Metro has not yet managed to solve the problem of waiting times that is affecting in particular the Blue Line and its passengers. This is a situation that has been dragging on for several months, since mid-April, when work was done to modernize the signaling system on that line.
According to information obtained by a passenger from the company, as a result of a complaint, the information system on the circulation of trains on the Blue Line is "with a technical anomaly leading to inaccurate information regarding the announced waiting time". "For that reason, and until the malfunction is repaired, Metro has preemptively chosen to turn off the line where that information should appear."The transport operator also indicated.
"Aware of the usefulness of the information this feature provides, we are, together with the system vendor, working to resolve this malfunction as quickly as possible." But the problem has been ongoing for several months. The Lisbon Metro had, at the end of May and in recent weeks, re-displayed the waiting times at Blue Line stations, but in fact the information was still wrong, as LPP was able to verify when a few minutes were still shown on the information panels but the trains were already arriving at the stations.
LPP contacted Metro de Lisboa on May 18, and they didn't answer until the date of publication of this article. The above mentioned information was sent on April 17th to a passenger, who complained about the lack of waiting information at the stations. The same passenger made, more recently, a new complaint to have a new update, having received a reply this week: "Unfortunately, we have not yet been able to get the functionality about waiting times at station piers on the Blue Line fully operational, it is not yet possible for us to predict its resolution. We understand your dissatisfaction and for that we reiterate our apologies, as we are aware that we are not meeting your expectations of service delivery."
It should be recalled that the Lisbon Metro closed a substantial part of the Blue Line over Easter weekend to continue modernizing the signaling system, which includes the public information system on station panels. A new train control system, Communications-Based Train Control (CBTC), has been installed and is expected to be completed on the Blue Line by the end of the year.
Waiting times have also been unstable on other Metro lines, in particular on the Green and Yellow Lines, in this case due to the works being carried out in the Campo Grande area The information on waiting times has also been disrupted on the API, so it is not being displayed on applications such as Google Maps or Next Metro. If you use these platforms, you will see the tabulated waiting times (i.e. the times that the Lisbon Metro trains are scheduled to run, not the real time times).
