The Power of Public Data - The Campaign to Fix Hudson Link
By Carley Hart
Carley Hart is the Director of Partnerships for the Runway Startup Program at Cornell Tech.
Two months ago I knew nothing about public transit policy or how to lead a civic engagement campaign. One bad commute home from New York City sent me down a rabbit hole: who is actually in charge of fixing public services, and how can you use AI and data to get their attention?
Here’s the backstory.
Hudson Link is the commuter bus that connects Rockland County, where I live, to NYC. Thousands of us rely on it every day. The service is frequently unreliable, and the operator publishes almost no usable data about how often buses actually show up on time.
On my way home one evening, my bus went from “arrives in 3 minutes” to a no-show. What I later learned is called a “ghost bus”. It had happened too many times, so this time I started building a web app right there at the bus stop, on my phone, using voice-to-text and Claude. By the time the next bus came 40 minutes later, I had the bones of a site.
I’m not technical. A year ago I couldn’t have built this. New York State doesn’t publish a usable real-time feed for this bus line, so I figured out a workaround in an afternoon: a scraper that reads the operator’s live tracking app every two minutes.
By the next weekend, fixhudsonlink.com was live with three things:
A tool that lets riders email the people in charge in under 60 seconds
A Ghost Bus Tracker where riders self-report missed buses
An automated dashboard that pulls the live bus data every two minutes and flags the buses that get cancelled or just vanish
The dashboard surfaces the metrics that matter: on-time rates by route and by hour.
Unfortunately, the numbers speak for themselves. It turns out 15-23% of buses a day don’t show up.
The goal of Fix Hudson Link is simple: put real numbers in front of riders, the operator, and NYS, so accountability has somewhere to start.
That data is what made government offices take our calls. Riders had been emailing for months and nothing happened, because one complaint is easy to ignore. A public dataset is not. Over the last month I met with State Senator Bill Weber’s Chief of Staff and four members of the NYS Department of Transportation. News 12 ran a segment, and two local papers covered it.
Our campaign is still pushing for better service. Here’s where things stand today.
The State Senator’s office was in our corner. The NYSDOT met with me for 30 minutes, and shared key constraints. There’s a driver shortage, the line is switching operators (Transdev will be replaced by Coach USA by the end of June 2026), the new operator is replacing the bad app with its own tech, and free services must continue running through this transition. All useful to know. But I didn’t walk out with the one thing I went in for: a real reliability standard, with a clear penalty for the operator when they miss it. Right now that’s still a hope, so I’ve submitted a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request for New York State’s contract with Coach USA.
The leverage is in the contract and that’s where I’ll keep pushing.
Long term, I plan to share the source code and playbook for this whole project so other cities and towns can run this exact campaign in their own communities.