The Signal · Edition 5 · October 2026
Every Stop, Counted
Published October 15, 2026 · By Justin Spencer Smith · Also on LinkedIn
Detroit's transit map got honest this month — about what it shows, and about what it still can't.
The QLINE is on the map — on its own tracks
The streetcar joined Live Transit Detroit on October 14, built from the QLINE's own published GTFS: all 12 stations, the Grand Boulevard terminus, and the downtown terminal loop, with live positions from the QLINE's public real-time feed. Getting there took three fixes, each found the same way — by checking the map against the street: a sign error that mirrored the track miles from where it belonged, a street centerline standing in for the actual track alignment, and a rendering cap written for a smaller map that silently clipped stops. The full story is Live Transit Detroit installment six, "The QLINE Sign Error."
10,583 stops, rebuilt from source
The launch completed a full rebuild of the map's stop registry from the agencies' own GTFS data: 5,124 DDOT stops, 5,437 SMART stops, and 22 QLINE stops — the QLINE previously had none. Every production stop ID was preserved, so nothing that referenced a stop before the rebuild broke after it. The count is verifiable the same way everything on the map is: go look.
The honest part
SMART's live feed still waits on SMART. The schedules are not the obstacle — all 45 SMART routes and all 5,437 SMART stops are on the map. What's missing is the real-time key, which runs through SMART's approval at Swiftly. Our October inquiry drew an automated acknowledgment and, so far, no answer; a formal key request followed on October 13. Until it lands, SMART positions arrive through a fallback that was never live, and the map's job is to say so rather than dress it up. We published the full account as a press release on October 14 — it's on the site, and it's the standing offer: the day the key arrives, SMART goes live on the same 60-second cadence as everything else. As of tonight the map labels the fallback for what it is: "SMART positions as of 10:40 PM — snapshot, not live GPS," with the count itself marked stale once a snapshot passes an hour old.
What's next
Two builds that were next are live. Service alerts shipped on October 14: DDOT bulletins and SMART notices as badges on the routes they affect, an active-alerts list, and the effects in plain language — 32 bulletins were active the night it shipped. And the trip planner's timing model was audited against the buses' own reported departures: at terminal stops it had been adding dwell that never happened, 806 seconds of phantom wait in the worst timing cells. Corrected, those cells read 269 seconds, against a 322-second clean baseline. What is actually next is the events layer — concerts, games, and festivals as destinations the trip planner understands, appearing only while they're relevant. Its sources are settled: Ticketmaster, the league feed for Red Wings games, and Eastern Market, with the major annual festivals entered by hand once their dates are confirmed.
Thirty-four subscribers got the first transit edition. This one goes to whoever's joined since. The work is the pitch: every stop, counted — and every gap, labeled.
The Signal is the newsletter of Detroit Automation Academy — where Detroit builds what's next. New editions monthly. If you know a young builder who should be in the room, send them our way.