The App Trap D.C. is awash in real-time transit information. And it's driving us nuts.

Think fast!

You’re about to step into the Dupont Circle FreshFarm market. But there’s little time to pick up salad greens, tomatoes and locally sourced mozzarella. According to the bus schedule app on your cellphone, the ride to your apartment is scheduled to depart 20th and P streets NW in five minutes. You figure that leaves about four minutes to buy produce. That’s a mere 240 seconds.

What do you do? Pick up food? Go to the bus stop? Can you do both and still make the bus?

This is me two Sundays ago. Indecisive, I begin to trot through the market. I’m looking for a relatively empty vendor so I can grab, pay, and go. No such luck. And now, as I walk past the guy selling probiotic yogurt drinks, I can see my bus cruising along Q Street. It’s pulling into its terminal stop at Connecticut Avenue, where it will idle before heading back around to P Street for the return trip to Glover Park.

I quickly do some mental math to complement the information from my phone. From experience, I know the bus typically idles for a couple minutes before commencing its return trip. This more or less backs up what the app is telling me: three minutes until my bus hits 20th and P.

I figure I can walk toward the stop and maybe grab some produce from the vendors along that stretch of the market. But as I’m strolling—my, that heirloom tomato looks juicy!—I become nervous about missing my bus. If I miss it, I’ll have to wait at least 15 minutes for the next one, probably longer. And I want to keep to the schedule I’ve sketched out for my day, which includes taking a two-hour nap.

I check again. Two minutes left. Screw this. My reusable bag is leaving the market empty.

At the bus shelter, it starts drizzling. My phone comes out again. But before I check my Weather Channel app, I check the D2 bus’ status: just one minute until arrival. I hit refresh. “Arriving” flashes on the screen.

But then a minute goes by. No D2. I check again: 16 minutes, the app announces. Sixteen? Is that a mistake? Maybe the bus just hasn’t left its idling spot on Q Street? Should I walk over there and check? Do I have time to dash back in the market to grab the salad greens after all? Or should I stay put, just in case the D2 magically appears?

So I wait and fume.

After about 15 minutes—and four NextBus checks—the bus pulls up. Glory be! I go home to my nap, but not to my fresh salad.

This is our marvelous, technologically enabled transit future, where the unpredictable huffing and puffing of yesteryear’s city bus is corralled into a helpful program that will maximize commuting efficiency, minimize transit-stop waiting, and slash the uncertainty that surrounds getting from one place to another. As I come home to a produce-free refrigerator, it doesn’t feel so magical.

Even if the predictive technology had worked perfectly, I’d still have spent vast chunks of my Sunday afternoon puzzling over bus timing, possible traffic jams, and the relative merits of immediate vegetable purchases versus delayed naps. Where I might have enjoyed a leisurely, somewhat inefficient Sunday, I had instead fallen into the App Trap.

And, as it happens, I’m not alone. From suburban car commuters OCD’ing on up-to-the-second traffic info at TBD.com to Metro riders staring up at the nearest arrival-time information display, we’ve become a region of logistics obsessives. Once the stuff of folk wisdom and secret shortcuts, the morning commute is now suffused with real-time data to be checked—and re-checked, and worried over, and second-guessed, and then discussed around the office water cooler a few hours later. For a hassle-free future, it’s awfully stressful.

A decade ago, my trip to the farmers’ market would have been a lot simpler. For bus commuters, there was no NextBus, the GPS-enabled bus arrival predictor that I check like a mercurial loon. Drivers had no Google Traffic to track roadway congestion. Metrorail’s brown message boards weren’t yet displaying train-arrival predictions.

Instead, for transit riders, there was just this: Schedules. You took them home and put them on the freezer door. Maybe you checked the details before heading to the stop, maybe not. Savvy Metrorail passengers might know that, say, Blue Line trains come every 12 minutes on Saturday afternoons. But to others, trains were just like buses: They came when they came, perhaps on schedule, perhaps not. The only advance warning you got was via those flashing platform lights that once dazzled tourists.