Vehicle Statuses

On the Live Map, Real-Time Stats there is a legend which shows all of the live vehicle statuses.

These statuses are useful for understanding which vehicles are actively delivering service as expected and which may need attention as there may be an issue occurring.

OTP/Headway

When a vehicle has an assignment, and it appears to be following the assignment (both spatially and temporally), a vehicle will either be on layover/deadhead (read more below) or its respective status either early, on-time, late; bunched, gapped, or expected.

For more information on assignment, please read: How does vehicle assignment work?

For more information on OTP statuses, please read: On-Time Performance in Live Map

For more information on Headway statuses, please read: Headway 101

Layover/Deadhead

A "layover" is time set aside in a schedule to allow for a break or recovery.  Deadheading is when a bus is running without passengers.  Swiftly represents vehicles in the layover or deadhead state with the color gray, which indicates that the vehicle is assigned to a block but not running a revenue trip at that moment.  On the map vehicles that are at the layover when it's beyond the scheduled trip departure time will be gray with a yellow ring. 

For more information on the Layover/Deadhead status please read: What is Layover/Deadhead?

Missing

The "Missing" status is intended to quantify the number of trips that are missing right now. Trips that are scheduled to take place right now, or within the next 5 minutes, and don't have a vehicle assigned to them will show up as "Missing".

Missing trips are displayed on the map with a "?" icon to help users identify where a vehicle should be.

Off-Route

The Off-Route status is intended to give insight into when a vehicle does not appear to be spatially following its assignment. 

For more information on the Off-Route status please read: Off-route vehicles in live operations?

Performance Unavailable

The Performance Unavailable status is intended to give insight into when a vehicle does not appear to be following its assignment.  If a vehicle is assigned from either manual assignment in the dashboard, a login from Onboard App, or from a feed that Swiftly deems to be very accurate, it will be considered trustworthy.  Trustworthy assignments are “sticky”, meaning if the vehicle does not seem to be doing its assignment it will be unpredictable (will not have predictions) but will maintain its assignment such that other vehicles cannot be autoassigned to that block assignment.  Because the vehicle is unpredictable, Swiftly will not create predictions for these vehicles.

Reasons a vehicle can become performance unavailable:

• too early
• too late
• not progressing
• unrealistic speed (we think it traveled too far given the time)
• timeout: has not received GPS information for a period of time

Unassigned

There are times when a vehicle will be labeled as unassigned meaning it is not matched with a block assignment. There are many reasons for an unassigned vehicle. For example, a vehicle is running an on-demand trip. The on-demand trip is not a revenue service in the GTFS but Swiftly is still receiving GPS pings from the vehicle. Other examples of why a vehicle is unassigned: 

• vehicle out of service (finished for the day)
• bad assignment information from AVL
• parked and off – Swiftly will display the last known location of that vehicle before it was turned off

Additionally, when a vehicle is being sent an assignment, but it does not seem to be doing its assignment (maybe it is too far from the route, not progressing, way too early way too late, or there has been a timeout), Swiftly will unassign the vehicle AND allow other vehicles to be autoassigned to the block. Swiftly will not create predictions for these vehicles.