MetroHero

» see dcmetrohero.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

MetroHero was a tracking app for the Washington Metro, written by two people who rode it to work. James and Jennifer Pizzurro started it in 2015 for a plain reason. The transit agency published a data feed, and nothing on the market turned that feed into a picture of where the trains were. "There were no apps or websites that could show you where your train was," Pizzurro said later. The Android app arrived in September 2015, an iOS web app in December, and a standalone iPhone app in April 2018.

What made it stick was the arithmetic underneath the live map. MetroHero scored each line on schedule adherence and headway, then kept its own archive of that history, so a rider could go back to a bad morning and read what the system had actually done. Automated accounts posted service problems as they appeared. By April 2018 roughly 13,000 people used it every month, a small number against a system carrying hundreds of thousands of trips a day, but those were the riders who argued with Metro in public.

On 10 February 2023 Pizzurro announced the app would be switched off on 1 July. The reasons were ordinary. The couple had moved from Arlington to Baltimore, and the project cost money and weekends that seven years of improvement in WMATA's own data practices no longer justified. "Given all the positive changes we've seen in the app landscape and in WMATA's data management and communication over the past 7 years, we've decided that the time has come for us to sunset the MetroHero project," he wrote. The servers went dark that Saturday afternoon and the app rendered a blank screen.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it measured ~

Washington riders talk about headway the way other people talk about weather, and before MetroHero the number was not published in a form you could argue with. The app computed it per line and stored the result, which turned a complaint into a chart. In 2019 the same developers worked with a local transit group on a Metrobus Report Card, grading bus performance against goals the agency had not set for itself.

~ the handover ~

Shortly before the end the Pizzurros published MetroHero's source code on GitHub. Stephen Repetski, a long-time Metro watchdog who writes for Greater Greater Washington, brought up dcmetrohero.net from that code, and other clones followed within days. ARIES for Transit, the developers' other project, was not affected and went on to cover systems around Washington and Baltimore.

~ the agency's answer ~

On 30 June 2023, the day before the shutdown, WMATA general manager Randy Clarke said Metro would publish a rider-facing performance tool of its own. It arrived the following week as MetroMeter. For most of MetroHero's life the agency had answered questions about train tracking by pointing at third-party apps, and the third party had just resigned.

~ reading somebody else's commute ~

I have never waited on a Washington Metro platform, and seven years of Orange Line headway data is not something I can check against anything I remember. The arrangement is what travels. A public agency sat on a feed it never visualized, two of its riders did the work on their own hardware, and the official version appeared in the same week the volunteers quit, in July 2023.

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