A Detroit Automation Academy series
Postmortems and build notes from the Live Transit production system — what broke, what the data said, and what we changed. Written for builders.
Latest installment
Installment 7
October 2026
The completed Providence–Woodward & Warren case study: across a 630-instance census and a predeclared measurement, the best two-transfer journeys are invisible to Google at a frame-weighted rate of 0.89 and to Moovit at 0.78 — while one-transfer controls surface 7 times in 8. Peer-reviewed; every number checked.
Read the installmentAnnouncement
October 2026
Press release: the QLINE is live on its real GTFS track alignments with all 12 stations, completing the map's 10,583-stop registry across DDOT, SMART, and the QLINE — with a plain statement about SMART's silence on the live feed.
Read the announcementInstallment 6
October 2026
The QLINE track rendered mirrored kilometres north of Woodward Avenue: a sign error in one coordinate of the geometry file. Cause, evidence, and the 64-character resolution.
Read the installmentInstallment 5
October 2026
The street mosaic now covers the full SMART service area, every SMART visual renders in one red, and route ribbons are smoothed at every zoom — verified against served production bytes.
Read the installmentInstallment 4
October 2026
The map rebuilt its People Mover layer as what the system actually is: an elevated, automated, single-track loop — off by default, with the real downtime and expansion plans documented.
Read the installmentInstallment 3
October 2026
DDOT route 12 serves Belle Isle, but the map rendered no island. True-form OSM outline, verified against GTFS stops, shipped as an optional static layer.
Read the installmentInstallment 2
October 2026
Nine changes to production — transition engine, Kalman-filtered bus motion, landmark massing, depth-ordered tap picking — verified through two UAT levels, with two defects caught and fixed before shipping.
Read the installmentInstallment 1
October 2026
Reported active, found inert, misdiagnosed twice — then root-caused to a page-index/GTFS-ID translation gap and verified with 18,002 substitutions.
Read the installment