NextMuni: Real-Time Muni Predictions & the Fight Over Who Owned Them
SFMTA piloted NextBus arrival predictions on the 22 Fillmore in 1999 and signed the vendor in 2001. In 2009 a licensee claimed to own the predictions and got a rider's app pulled from the App Store; the agency insisted the data was public and published a feed that November. Cubic bought NextBus in 2013, then won the $89M contract to replace it.
Live
📅 since 1999
✔ Editor-reviewed
📊 Impact
SFMTA states the margin of error is under one minute for predictions of five minutes or less, and under two minutes for ten-minute predictions. Those are the operator's own figures; no independent evaluation of NextMuni's prediction accuracy or of its effect on ridership was found. Over 400 shelter displays lost predictions in June 2022 when AT&T switched off 3G.
🎓 Lesson
A city can pay for a measurement and still not own it. San Francisco's predictions only became a public feed after SFMTA wrote ownership into the contract in 2009 and required the vendor to hand over an XML stream. The licence is still not an open one: SFMTA's own deed is revocable and covers timetables only, and the real-time feed riders' apps actually use is the region's, not the city's.
Evidence🏛️ Official
Scale🏙️ City-wide
Cost≈$89M for the 2020 replacement contract (Cubic, six years plus two five-year options)
FundingSFMTA capital budget
Sources
↗ Streetsblog SF — Does NextBus Own Real-Time Muni Data? (26 Jun 2009)The dispute, sentence-level. NextBus Information Systems (NBIS) told Apple it 'is the sole agent for commercial use of the NextBus real-time prediction data' and held 'exclusive rights to distribution of this data to mobile phones'; Apple pulled the rider-built app Routesy. SFMTA spokesperson Judson True countered that Muni 'owns the data in question and that the public should have access to it'. NBIS was a licensee, distinct from NextBus, Inc., the agency's contractor — the entry keeps them apart.
↗ Electronic Frontier Foundation — Who Controls Data About Public Transportation? (Sep 2009)Independent legal read on the same facts: 'NBIS, like the NYC MTA, appears guilty of copyfraud. They've been unable to produce any proof that they do, in fact, own the data in question.' Records that developer Steven Peterson built Routesy in 2008, that NBIS demanded in June 2009 that it be discontinued, and that his attorney got Apple to restore it once SFMTA clarified ownership.
↗ Streetsblog SF — MTA Publishes NextMuni Arrival Time Feed (12 Nov 2009)The resolution and the contract language the entry rests on: the renegotiated contract 'expressly declared that the MTA owns the data' and obliged the vendor that 'Contractor shall provide necessary technological assistance in placing an XML data stream (via weblink or other SFMTA approved data conveyance)'. Ends a five-month dispute. This is the date a public developer feed existed — ten years after the pilot, and separate from the pilot, the citywide contract and the street displays.
↗ SFMTA — Changes Coming to NextMuni (operator, 12 Aug 2021)Operator chronology and self-criticism: 'When the SFMTA first partnered with NextBus more than twenty years ago to create NextMuni, the real-time transit vehicle arrival predictions system was state-of-the-art.' Names the failure modes the replacement targets — inaccurate predictions near the start of routes, and 'ghost buses' that are predicted and never arrive.
↗ SFMTA — Next Generation Customer Information System (operator, project page)Currency check, July 2026: status still 'Implementation / Construction'; the 2023-2024 phase 'System Enhancements and MuniMobile App' is marked Completed; capital cost line $25.4 million (the SFMTA capital share, not the contract ceiling). Promises 'a more sophisticated and accurate vehicle arrival prediction algorithm' but publishes no accuracy target or measurement, which is why none is claimed here.
↗ Cubic — Cubic Wins Contract to Deliver Next Generation Customer Information System for San Francisco MTA (1 Oct 2020)The replacement contract, vendor-announced: SFMTA contracted Cubic Transportation Systems 'in an amount not to exceed $88,980,877, for an initial term of six years with two optional five-year terms'. The same amount appears in the SFMTA board calendar item of 16 June 2020 (PDF too large to render in this environment; figure taken from the indexed text and matched against the vendor release).
↗ Cubic Transportation Systems Acquires NextBus, Inc. (Jan 2013)The vendor chain: NextBus, Inc., founded 1997 in Emeryville, passed through Grey Island Systems International and Webtech Wireless before Cubic 'acquired all of the outstanding capital stock of NextBus, Inc. from Webtech Wireless, Inc.' on 24 January 2013 for CAD$20.75 million. NextBus was then in over 100 North American agencies. Cubic later folded the brand into Umo and moved the public API endpoints off webservices.nextbus.com to retro.umoiq.com.
↗ SFMTA — GTFS Transit Data licence (operator, the licence deed)The licence position, verbatim: 'nonexclusive, limited, and revocable'; mandatory notice on derivative works — 'Reproduced with permission granted by the City and County of San Francisco…'; 'The License granted hereunder does not include any right to sublicense.'; SFMTA 'reserves the right to alter or cease to provide the Data at any time without prior notice'; supplied 'as is' with no warranty of accuracy. And the scope limit that matters: 'This is not real-time data, only scheduled service.'
↗ 511 SF Bay (Metropolitan Transportation Commission) — Transit DataWhere the real-time feed actually lives today: the regional 511 portal, not the city's. Carries GTFS, GTFS-Realtime (Trip Updates, Vehicle Positions, Service Alerts) and SIRI/NeTEx APIs, lists SFMTA among operators, requires a registered API token, defaults to '60 requests per 3600 seconds', and applies its own data agreement on top of any operator terms.
↗ SFMTA — AT&T 3G Decommissioning Now Impacting NextMuni Electronic Displays (operator, 8 Jun 2022)Counterweight, sentence-level: 'over 400 NextMuni displays that are currently utilizing AT&T 3G modems will no longer be able to display real-time Muni vehicle arrival predictions'. The street-level layer of a 23-year-old system was switched off by a carrier, not by the agency. Replacement: 'over 700 new Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) displays'.
↗ SFMTA — Over Half Next Generation Muni Shelter Displays Installed (operator, 2 Nov 2022)Rollout progress: over 435 of 800+ planned LCDs installed, replacing the old NextBus signs, 'with an emphasis on underserved neighborhoods'. New displays add crowding data from automatic passenger counters and short-term route changes.
↗ SFMTA — Not Your Ordinary GPS: Tracking Your Ride (operator, accuracy claim)The only accuracy figures found, and they are the operator's own: 'The margin of error overall is less than one minute for predictions of five-minutes or less. For 10-minute predictions, the margin of error is less than two minutes.' The page carries no date, sample or method, and adds that the times 'are simply predictions'. A circulating counter-figure — predictions wrong close to half the time at commute hours, credited to a study by the app company Swyft — could not be verified sentence-level (the carrying SF Examiner article returned HTTP 429 repeatedly) and is deliberately not used.
↗ Lee, Tyner & Vasavda — Moving Minds: The Next Generation of Real-Time Transit Information in San Francisco (peer-reviewed, 2018)Transportation Research Record, 2018. A stated-preference survey of 5,856 Muni customers in English, Spanish and Chinese, run by SFMTA to design the replacement system: facing a 20-minute wait, respondents choosing Muni rose 'from 45 percent with basic information… to as much as 72 percent (with a smartphone app) or 82 percent', and with countdown signs offering alternative routes 'differences among income groups virtually disappeared'. Peer-reviewed but agency-authored, and it measures hypothetical responses to proposed designs, not the deployed system — so it does not lift this entry's evidence grade.
↗ Jerold Chinn — 'Janky' NextBus Muni prediction system gets first round of upgrades (press, 15 Nov 2022)Independent corroboration of the start year — the project 'replaces the 23-year-old NextBus technology (launched 1999)' — and of the handover: SFMTA CTO Lisa Walton called the November 2022 switch 'a soft launch of the new software', phased through 2024, with roughly 800 solar-powered signs for locations without power.
↗ IET/IEE — London Transport's Countdown system: a leader in the bus transport revolution (1993) (precedence check)Why this entry claims no superlative. London Transport trialled Passenger Information at Bus Stops on Route 18 in 1992 and installed the first Countdown signs in autumn 1992 — street-level arrival displays seven years before San Francisco's pilot; the 1993 conference paper independently fixes the system before 1994. A US research precedent also exists: MyBus, built at the University of Washington by Daniel Dailey in the mid-1990s, which was not verified sentence-level here and is therefore only noted, not asserted. San Francisco is early and consequential, not first — and it is by some years the oldest real-time transit feed in this atlas.
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “NextMuni: Real-Time Muni Predictions & the Fight Over Who Owned Them” — San Francisco, United States. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/sf-nextmuni/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.
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