MARTA — Official

The update is smooth, but there are some problems. Whenever you try to track the bus sometime, the bus icon will zoom through throughout the entire route and when you click follow on map sometime, it’ll take you to a whole other part of Georgia. And it is not accurate on the time or location. You have to close the app open it again and do other stuff and sometimes this has caused me to miss the bus even when leaving outside early.

It’s just amazing that as technology evolves, MARTA demonstrates time and time again that the money they are making, is not at all going to the betterment of their transportation. The apps do NOT work for anything, their call center employees are clueless, and they are constantly renovating new looks for their stations while the service continues to be lackluster and mediocre. Black Hollywood is what this god forsaken city is supposed to be called, it should just be called the US slum district. With it’s sham of a transportation service unable to even get people to their destinations in a timely manner. It’s like, I’m better off giving Lyft of Uber $300+ weekly so that I can even get to work ON TIME. They have no drivers because the company is cheap and refuses to pay their employees a livable wage, therefor justifying their mediocre performances followed by corporates lackluster customer service. It’s like, why even have a service at all if it’s so bad. Just make people walk, at least I’d know I’d get there on time rather than having to gamble and hope that MARTA’s drivers decided to come in to work today. Pitiful. Now I’m forced to have to deal with their worthless call center employees every day now to see if their lackluster service is even MOVING.

Any good app should improve with each subsequent update. “MARTA On the GO” disproves this theory by getting progressively worse over time. I use MARTA every weekday, both trains and busses. The Next Train feature will sometimes show accurate data. Other times, not so much. For example, it will show Hamilton Holmes and Indian Creek both to be heading east (or west) which is clearly not the case. It will add Bankhead to the queue exactly 1 minute before the train is set to arrive at the station. It will show four or five eastbound trains and no westbound routes, again, clearly not showing reality. Or, it may not show any trains at all. And the App rarely matches what the MARTA platform screens are saying. With the latest updates, it is next to impossible to scroll down to the afternoon and evening portions of the bus routes. And the ‘Favorites’ feature is now relegated to a 2nd page of the app. Why would you put ‘Favorites’ in a harder to access location? The bus ‘Real Time’ feature is a great idea – I love it. But sometimes it will show a bus heading to a station (eg Lindbergh) but disappear from the screen a few blocks from arrival – only to reappear headed back in the opposite direction without the actual bus ever showing up at the station. Not all busses are tracked on the ‘Real Time’ app. And the real time locations are not always updated in a timely way. The location of a bus can jump up to a mile on the map in a split second. All this makes the Real Time option infuriatingly unreliable. I’d like for “MARTA On the Go” to be a trustworthy and effective tool. Sadly, it is not.