To understand why data accuracy matters to LA Metro’s riders, Nina Kin — Tech Lead on LA Metro’s Digital Experience Team — often points to moments like this:

It’s 7:48 a.m., and a parent on a tight schedule is trying something new: leaving the car at home. She drops her child at daycare, locks her bike, and jogs to the bus stop, coffee in hand. The app says the bus will arrive in three minutes, then one, then nothing. The icon disappears, the bus never comes, and by the time another line rolls past, trust has already left.

Quiet failures in an otherwise ordinary morning that shape how Angelenos decide whether to trust public transit again.

Metro, the agency that once embodied car-era Los Angeles is beginning to recognize how bikes and transit aren’t separate systems — they’re halves of the same promise.

When we talk about infrastructure, we usually mean concrete. For Kin, though, the foundation of a great transit system isn’t poured; it’s published via an app with a superb user experience.

“We really want the customer experience to be a focus on the same level as operations,” Kin says.

Architecture of reliability

Kin’s world runs on a few unglamorous acronyms that quietly shape every trip you take: GTFS and GBFS.

GTFS, the General Transit Feed Specification, is the open-data format that lets your phone tell you when the next bus will arrive. GBFS, the General Bikeshare Feed Specification, does the same for bike-share systems: where docks are, how many bikes are waiting, and whether there’s space to return one at your destination.

To most riders, those acronyms are invisible. But to Kin, they represent the nervous system of public mobility, the difference between trust and frustration. A “ghost bus,” or one that does not appear when scheduled, isn’t just a missed ride — it represents a broken promise. When a bus app says five minutes and the bus never shows up, it changes how people plan their lives. They start padding their commutes, stop believing arrival times, or give up on transit altogether.

That emotional impact is exactly what Kin is trying to solve: “When people see that the information matches reality, they feel like the system respects their time.”

The same principle applies to bikes. Both standards help riders trust what they see in their apps today, but Kin is focused on what they could enable tomorrow. A near future where the two feeds talk to each other where a trip planner app doesn’t just tell you the next train but shows the safest, low-stress bike route to get there, and whether there’s a dock or secure rack waiting when you arrive.

Data standards as public goods

The deeper Kin goes into open-data governance, the more she sees civic technology as an equity issue. “These standards — GTFS, GBFS — are community-governed,” she says. “Public-interest advocates deserve a seat at that table.”

She points to Boston’s MBTA as a model, with dedicated staff for rider-facing technology and a “pathways” dataset that helps wheelchair users navigate stations. “The next step for systems like Metro ahead of the mega events in the next few years is using data to make the system legible and easy for everyone.”

We can easily envision how a pathways guide for users on their smartphone would have a “curb cut” effect, making transit more approachable not just for wheelchair and mobility device users, but for those with heavy e-bikes and strollers.

In the end, trust is infrastructure, and the bricks and composite of that infrastructure are safety and accessibility for every user. If we want bikes and transit to compete, and win, against car dependence, the experience can’t just be good; it has to be impeccable. The path, the data, the station, the app — they all have to tell the same story: “you belong here, and you can count on this.” That’s the quiet revolution happening inside Metro and across California’s cities: a recognition that the future of mobility isn’t only about speed or capacity, but about credibility, a public realm reliable enough to believe in.