About marta.fail

MARTA® and the MARTA logo are registered trademarks of the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority. This website is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by MARTA.

marta.fail is a project that makes MARTA (Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority) service alerts more accessible. MARTA is the primary public transit system for Fulton, DeKalb, and Clayton Counties in Metro Atlanta, Georgia.

These Service alerts can be cumbersome to find. Riders have to either check MARTA’s website regularly, sign up for email notifications, or use a mobile app whose alerting features are limited and not customizable.

In the worst cases, service disruptions aren’t communicated clearly at all, leaving riders in the dark about delays, detours, or cancellations.

MARTA also does not provide public statistics on service reliability, making it hard for riders, advocates, and policymakers to assess how well the system is performing over time.

Services Offered

Bluesky Alert Accounts

marta.fail provides a set of Bluesky accounts that post concise, timely alerts for MARTA’s bus and rail services. Each account focuses on a specific line or service type, allowing riders to follow only the alerts relevant to their commute. The alerts.marta.fail account aggregates all alerts into a single feed.

Bus Route Statistics and Route Maps

This site offers detailed statistics on bus route performance and frequency of service disruptions. Additionally, the site provides route maps and bus locations that highlight affected areas during service alerts, helping riders visualize disruptions.

TBD: API Access

We collect, normalize, and store all MARTA service alerts and GTFS-RT data in a structured format, along with archives of historical data. This data is currently used to power the Bluesky alert accounts and bus route statistics. In the future, we plan to offer a public API that allows developers and researchers to access this data for their own applications or analyses.

More Coming Soon! 🚀

General Methodology

We collect GTFS-RT data from MARTA’s Developer Portal at a frequent interval. This data includes real-time information about bus and rail locations, trip updates, and service alerts. In parallel, we collect all MARTA service alerts from the MARTA Eventbridge platform.

These data are processed into a normalized format, and syndicated to the Bluesky alert accounts and internal databases for analysis. Bus route statistics are generated by analyzing historical GTFS-RT data, in addition to MARTA service alert data, to identify patterns in service disruptions and delays.

Contact Info, Feedback, and Contributions

If you have any questions, feedback, or suggestions for improving marta.fail, please feel free to reach out via [email protected]. If you find any errors, omissions, or have ideas for new features, please let us know!

License

The code powering the marta.fail website and data collection is currently closed-source. This may be reconsidered in the future.

All data provided on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License. You are free to share and adapt the data, provided you give appropriate credit, do not use it for commercial purposes, and indicate if changes were made.

*What is GTFS?

GTFS stands for General Transit Feed Specification. It’s a standardized format for public transportation schedules and associated geographic information. GTFS feeds allow developers to create applications that provide transit information, such as route planning and real-time updates, by using the data provided by transit agencies.

Use of this service is subject to our Disclaimer

Release History

  • 2025-12-24: Polished About page content. Added Routes page with system-wide statistics and per-route alert counts.
  • 2025-06-01: Website re-built with new sections and disclaimers added.
  • 2024-12-24: Migrated to Astro framework with React Islands for improved performance and developer experience. Refactored FAQ and Release Notes into separate pages with a new navigation layout. Added a new Stats page placeholder. Enhanced the search list with column sorting, emoji indicators for route types, and a "List More" functionality.
  • 2024-12-20: Fixed route sorting logic in the search list to correctly order by type (Rail, Streetcar, Bus) and then by route number for buses or alphabetically for rail/streetcar.
  • 2024-12-03: Added search functionality allowing users to filter MARTA accounts by name, Bluesky handle, or type (Bus, Rail, Streetcar).
  • 2024-11-26: Initial launch of marta.fail. Basic display of MARTA alert accounts on Bluesky. Future plans include individual accounts for each bus route and rail line.