marta.fail rebrands as atltransit.live, adds developer API and stop-level analytics

Exciting news to share!

Atlanta’s unofficial MARTA tracking service is changing its name. marta.fail, the site that grew out of a Bluesky bot posting MARTA service alerts, is relaunching as atltransit.live.

The domain migration is underway now. The data feed that currently powers marta.fail will move over to the new site soon.

The rename addresses a problem the project outgrew. marta.fail worked fine as a name for an alert bot, but it felt out of place as the project expanded into live vehicle tracking, reliability analytics, and a public API. The new name is meant to signal a serious data tool, not a complaint account.

The move also brings a substantial upgrade to the site’s analytics. Where marta.fail mostly pushed out alerts as they happened, atltransit.live tracks route-level reliability over time, including daily cancellation rates and breakdowns by time of day. Riders can see whether a given route tends to run worse during rush hour.

The site now reports reliability at the level of individual stops, too, rather than averaging performance across an entire route. All of the data is drawn from MARTA’s public GTFS, GTFS-RT, and (proprietary) real-time rail feeds - in addition to a deep archive of GTFS-RT data.

For more information on GTFS, visit gtfs.org.

For developers, the site is launching a versioned API with documentation through Swagger UI and an OpenAPI spec. It authenticates with bearer tokens and covers alerts, rail realtime arrivals, bus reliability metrics, a live event stream for clients that don’t want to poll, webhooks, and bulk history exports in NDJSON or Parquet format. Nothing like it existed under the marta.fail name.

In addition to a free tier, there are also modestly priced API tiers that provide higher rate limits and access to more information.

Through the above, you can also use an LLM like Claude or Codex/ChatGPT to collect information from the site. (Deeper integration with those services is TBD.)

The site also adds a status page that reports the health of the feeds and APIs it depends on, including MARTA’s realtime data and the site’s own statistics service. It shows current status, latency, and offers a manual refresh option. The idea is to let riders tell whether a stale alert is MARTA’s problem or the site’s.

Two changes are still ahead. The marta.fail data feed itself is expected to move over to atltransit.live soon. This is just a screen name change. You would not need to change any of your Bluesky follows.

Next, I plan to add CobbLinc transit too, so, for at least between Fulton, DeKalb, and Clayton, users and developers can see a unified view of transit systems in Metro Atlanta.

Since you’ve reached the end of this article, you can try out, for free, two months of the higher-tiered Developer accounts. Use referral code RIDEFREE2.

— Michael ([email protected] / [email protected])

atltransit.live is built and operated by Civic Forge Solutions LLC. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by MARTA or CobbLinc. All data comes from public schedule, realtime, and alert feeds.