CTA Tattler

Is CTA working on bunching too? I took a 148 to work today as usual, and it waited a few minutes at a stop on Irving Park before getting on LSD. 148s don't tend to bunch where I live, but I watch a parade of southbound 135s every morning, most of them empty.

Massive delay on the brown line (purple too?) for trains coming into Merchandise Mart. It took us about 25 minutes to get from Sedgewick to Merchandise Mart, and I think I was on one of the trains that was closer to the front of the line.

Really? An innovation learned from the Underground? Really?

What other innovations can the CTA staff now learn from across the pond? Helping people who need assistance? Basic customer service skills? English?

The CTA will never get rid of bus bunching.
The drivers are afraid of driving alone on the mean streets of the city.

Whiteboards in front of the turnstiles? So anyone with a dry marker will be able to create "rider alerts"?

What a nifty, well thought-out idea!

Interlocking problem at Lake and Wells street caused delay this morning, a little after 8 AM. No announcements for "13" minutes (closer to 20 by the helpful CTA sign) and then infrequently. Backed up trains all elevated trains in the Loop. Also took a extra ten minutes to get out of the Loop heading South on the Green Line. Things break all the time, especially with the cold and all. But please have some announcements; you can see the problem from the switching tower.

Rusty: According to the presentation to the CTA Board a week or two ago, the whiteboards are not in front of the turnstiles permanently. They are mobile and are only wheeled there when a major delay or service reroute/change is in effect. Otherwise they're stored securely elsewhere in the station.

Could anyone come by and wipe off or rewrite on the board while it's out? Well, yes, theoretically. But since they're only out during disruptions there is a smaller chance of vandalism. And since posters cannot be printed at an instant on-site and flat panel screens are costly to implement, this seems like a pretty good, low-tech, quick improvement to me...

I cant see how this is an "innovation" at all. Dont they already use the white-board system for elevator status? How much insight could it have taken to say, "Let's use the same idea, but instead of just elevators, it could be used for all delays"? Dont get me wrong, I think its a great idea, but I just dont see why we should be so grateful to the cta as if this is some huge improvement in quality of service.

What would be nice is if they were to use these new LED "information boards" that are being installed as part of the Brown Line Rehab (and already were at many more recently-remodeled stations) to display, oh, you know, INFORMATION...rather than CTA advertisements.

A temporary whiteboard is going to need to be light enough for a single customer service agent to move into position. That means it's also going to be light enough to disappear, too.

Being light enough for a single person to move, it can't be very tall, or it would be prone to tipping over on people's heads. But if it's not at at least eye level, it's not going to be very well seen, except by those who's path it blocks.

How many of these expensive whiteboards will be: A. Stolen, B. Vandalized, C. Lost, or D. Be ruined when the only marker available is a permanent marker?

If they want something low-tech, they already have it. They're called walls, pieces of paper, regular markers, and tape.

And no one trips over a paper sign taped to the wall. The savings from whiteboard injury claims that will never be filed can stock every station with enough paper, markers and tape to last forever.

No one expects them to magically produce posters at every station. (Although a cheap, networked inkjet printer could solve that problem for about the same price as a whiteboard and suitable stand.) But if you're going to use hand-made signs, there's no reason to waste all that money on whiteboards that will be tripped-over, vandalized, and stolen.

It's pretty bad when they look for a low-cost, low-tech solution, and end up wasting so much money when a better, less expensive solution could be implimented in the time it takes to run to Office Depot to pick up paper, markers, and tape.

I STILL contend the advertised slow zone removal from Wilson to Sheridan is a farce. Its now SLOWER for the first couple blocks out of Wilson until you get past Montrose. Now its a flying 25mph instead of 15mph from there to Sheridan. BIG DEAL. These tracks along the cemetary used to be 55mph just a few years back. A lot more work still needs to be done before the CTA should be bragging about that particular slow zone removal. Why can't they set a goal of Lake to Howard on Red in 45 minutes or less by the end of 2008, just like they have on the Blue line to O'hare???

Also, yes Jefferson Park to Harlem is an improvement, but it is still roughly an hour from Downtown to O'hare, a lot of work remains on the Blue line as well. In the 80's you could make it from Clark/Lake to O'hare in 35 minutes. Only at the CTA after tens of millions in rehabbing a line's tracks does it still have worse performance than 20 years ago!

How nice a whiteboard would have been to alert those of us trying to reach the loop on 12/24 to take the Red instead of the Brown/Purple.

The switch into the loop for the Brown/Purple was broken. . .70 minutes from Belmont to Wells.

Rusty, lighten the fuck up. You make a whiteboard sound like it's going to cause the apocalypse.

I'm dubious this is much more expensive and as you claim infinitely worse than your earth moving paper-notes-taped-to-wall scheme.

Sheesh, you might need to talk to someone.

At least they're doing something, and hopefully it might save me from passing the turnstiles to find out a train hasn't come for an hour.

I don't think whiteboards will be that much of a problem. After all, the CTA is already using the whiteboards to notify riders about busted elevators. I was wondering how long it would take the CTA to realize that they could also use the whiteboards for this.

The one thing that bothers me is that the CTA is not using the LEDs that are already in place at many L stations. How many times do riders have to be reminded about Chicago Card Plus? Metra makes full use of their LCD displays when there is a service disruption.

The station I use -- the Red Line, Bryn Mawr -- generally has a few service alerts taped to the walls. And you know what? I don't have time to read them, because I don't know if the next southbound is seconds away or 15 minutes away, and if I don't get right up there, I don't know if I'll miss a train, and if I miss a train, I don't know when I'll get to work. I don't care how they do implement it, but it needs to be visible to commuters in a rush, and those taped-up sheets of paper wouldn't be.

What I find truly hillarious is that Rusty does not realize that there have always been whiteboards in the stations. As has been mentioned, they are used to inform people which elevators are not working. Yet he acts as if this is a new thing that all of the sudden will cause people, for whatever reason, to want to vandalizing the boards. I have no idea why he thinks anybody would have a huge urge to do this, especially when there are employees in every station (as well as security camaras). Rusty's lack of knowledge that these things already exist, just being used for different purposes, confirms what already has been pretty clear from his previous posts. He does not ride the CTA.

Can the tattler request a list of all hires and fires (and slaries) made since President Huberman (April 07) took over? An associate made a FOIA request and was never replied to. I'd also like to see the jobs there are now that pay over $100,000 and those positions that paid more than $100,000 when Pres. Huberman took over. Are any of these positions replaced by consultants and how much do the consultants make per hour ($100 per hour consultant equals $200,000/year). Please ask for the total payments to consultants pre-April 07 and now.

MK - I think you helped make one of Rusty's points. There have long been (for about 6 years) white boards in the stations (although were fixed, not portable). They have been prone to petty vandalism (erasing names of stations with out-of-order elevators, adding station names, writing gang symbols, general graffiti).

They also have been poorly maintained by the station staff --illegible at times, outdated at others.

I believe the strongest points Rusty made are accurate - these signs are neither new nor wonderfully effective new means of communication. That whole Trib puff piece which inspired this discourse was regurgitated from a presentation given to the CTA board which talked about the wonderful new means of communication the CTA is employing to help inform customers. I'm all for improving communications but I saw nothing new of value in that presentation.

While the whiteboards may have some value, they are not worthy of major kudos for new innovations.

I guess I don't really understand, in this day and age, why the CTA can't implement some simple electronic signs that tell you when the next train is due into the station. This seems to be commonplace on most other transit systems in major cities...yet, the best we can do is random stops along the system that warn you when a train is 5 minutes away. Obviously, I don't know the extent of what it would take to implement a system that could actually tell you how many minutes away the next train is, or provide actual, useful warnings, but other cities have managed to come up with this information...so, why can't we?

"I believe the strongest points Rusty made are accurate - these signs are neither new nor wonderfully effective new means of communication. That whole Trib puff piece which inspired this discourse was regurgitated from a presentation given to the CTA board which talked about the wonderful new means of communication the CTA is employing to help inform customers. I'm all for improving communications but I saw nothing new of value in that presentation.

While the whiteboards may have some value, they are not worthy of major kudos for new innovations. "

Oh, I agree with you completely. But you are not correct that this was one of Rusty's points. He said that they would be vandalized or stolen, which is utterly absurd considering that whiteboards have existed for quite awhile and I haven't seen or heard of any of those problems. I think this is a very minor improvement over having scattered paper signs all over the place (which is the current procedure). But I don't think it is worthy of long newspaper articles or for anybody to act as if this was a huge deal. It is unfortunate that all the CTA needs to do is issue a press release and then all the media outlets immediately do a story without bothering to consider whether it is of any importance or even if there is a better way to report on it than simply regurgatate the release. I look at all the press releases and I pay attention to everything the media reports about the CTA (at least those that available via a Google news search) and it is truly astonishing how often all the news organizations just repeat exactly what is in the release, almost word for word. A few months ago, in the middle of the red line subway work a press release was a little lazy in its wording about the weekday overnight 9 p.m.- 5 a.m. reroutes and did not specify its usual "the following morning". Immediately afterwards at least one of the newspapers(and I think both), several of the TV stations, and WBBM radio all had articles stating that there would be reroutes from 9 P..M. Sunday night until 5 a.m. Friday morning. This dispite the fact that the work had already been occuring for weeks with the same routine and had even been reported correctly each time by themselves. But the reporters don't have common sense enough to use their brains and figure out that the press release was not literal nor can they apparently realize that the CTA is obviously not going to reroute the red line during rush hour. At around the same time many articles also misinterpreted one of the weekly releases about blue line work and stated that the CTA will "begin replacing the ties" at the first date specified in the release despite the fact that the blue line work was almost complete (and they had reported many times prior that the work was occuring including when the CTA first announced it). It is really sad how lazy journalism in this town is. And the Tribune and Sun-Times wonder why readership is down.

Tang wrote -"While the whiteboards may have some value, they are not worthy of major kudos for new innovations. "

MK wrote - "Oh, I agree with you completely. But you are not correct that this was one of Rusty's points. "
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Point taken, MK. I was sure I had read that in one of Rusty's posts, but it appears I was projecting my own frustration with this emperor's-new-clothes-announcement on to Rusty's argument.

It's not just the ohmigod-whiteboards-will-save-us announcement, but the announcement of the supposed "NEW" signage. This signage has been installed in stations dating back to August 2003 - when the Kostner station reopened on the Pink (then-Blue) line. It was used in all the other Pink Line stations and in the reopened Brown Line stations.

I've also seen this "new" signage in several other locations, including the rehabbed stations on the Dan Ryan part of the Red Line and recently (since 2003) rehabbed stations downtown (Lake-Red, Jackson-Red, Jackson-Blue, and others).

Since most of these 20-some stations with the new signage were opened/rehabbed years and months prior to the announcement that they were going to start using "new" signage (Addison and Montrose Brown are the exceptions) I can't understand how it can be touted as a new CTA innovation - and nobody is challenging that. At best, it's disingenuous spin. At worst, it's fabrication and taking credit for other's work.

However, to be fair, the CTA's press release didn't call the signage new, and it acknowledged it had been used for "the last few years." It was only in the president's presentation to the board, and in newspaper articles about it, that they referred to the signage being "new". (Sloppy journalism?)