CTA Tattler

This one is a joke: "Make sure all CTA employees who deal with the public are trained to do so."

It'll never happen!
Mumbling bus drivers, motormen who won't tell the truth about trains that don't move & myriad other reasons.

The goal appears to be that they will all recieve the proper training, not that they will actually practice it 100% of the time.

There's also the problem of defining what good customer service is. What's good is a matter of perspective. For example, a driver who waits at a transfer point for passengers from a connecting bus may delivering outstanding customer service from the perspective of those rushing to his bus, but people who are delayed or affected by the resulting bus bunching may not be so quick to agree.

And we're also talking about a huge number of humans. The larger the number of people involved, the more likely you'll be able to find non-conformists. Because you're talking about human beings, you will NEVER reach the point where they're all trying to do the right thing all the time. It just won't happen.

But that doesn't mean the organization shouldn't strive for that unattainable goal. If anything, the fact that perfection is unatainable is an even greater reason to strive for it.

Being a perfectionist doesn't mean being perfect. The effort should be praised rather than cursing the unattainable goal.

Yes, there will be "mumbling bus drivers, motorment who won't tell the truth about trains that don't move & myriad other reasons" why perfection won't ever be reached, but that isn't a reason to not strive for the best... and even less of a reason to not bother training for it! If anything, the fact that these characters will always exist is an even greater reason to make better training a primary goal.

I'm waiting for the bus bunching project to go in affect. People complain about bus bunching a lot..I wonder how much they'll complain when they're on a bus that is forced to wait 5 minutes at a stop to relieve the bunching. I expect they'll complain more vorciferously.

Bus bunching happens when one bus is delayed. Because that first bus has been delayed, more people gather at the stops, delaying it even further. Meanwhile, the buses behind it have lighter loads because people made it to the stops in time for the already delayed bus.

The fix isn't to delay any buses. The fix is to get a bus out in front to where the first bus should have been.

There are two ways to fix it: The expensive way is to have buses and drivers on stand-by, ready to jump in where the first bus should have been. This allows the delayed bus to catch-up by having a lighter load. The next bus probably still will have a lighter load, and may need to pause even at stops where there are no passengers, but it would still be traveling at it's scheduled speed.

The trick is to be able to deploy an empty bus and driver at the right spot, at the right time. And if you could predict where to put them, then why not just adjust the schedule, and plan to have them in revenue service instead?

The second way to fix bunching is to run a bus in express or limited mode to catch-up to where the first delayed bus should have been. Essentially passengers on the delayed bus bound for stops in the ad-hoc express zone are asked to switch to the bus behind, and then the first bus takes off as an express.

The second way doesn't work if the first bus can't gain any time by going express. That is, if traffic is bad, and the bus can't really run express, the attempt to fix the bunching will fail.

The other issue is that when you're running express, passengers waiting at stops will be upset at being passed-by. Thanks to electronic signs, you can lessen that when by-passed passengers can't tell that the bus was on the route they were waiting for.

A third way to fix bus bunching is to have shorter routes. The longer a route is, the more likely any given bus is to fall behind schedule. With shorter routes, the bus reaches a terminus, and has recovery time that can be used to relieve bunching. The problem is that you're essentially building inefficiencies into the schedules. Perhaps a manager can propose that now, in the interest of relieving bunching. But five years from now, another manager is going to be under presure to cut costs, and taking out those inefficiencies will be an easy fix, and bus bunching will be the inevitable result again!

Ultimately the grumbling won't come from delayed passengers. It'll come from taxpayers who really don't want to spend money on the inefficiencies that are required for a permanent bus bunching solution.

Personally, most of my complaints about bus bunching would go away if I simply knew about it in advance. I really don't care whether the buses are close to one another or not.

I do care about waiting out in the cold for 25 minutes for a bus for no particular reason. If people could tell in advance when the bus was going to get there, there would still be some downsides to bus bunching, but it would not be the maddeningly aggravating problem it is now.

People have been telling the CTA about bus tracking technology for years now. So they know how to fix the problem.

They just haven't bothered to implement the solution (except on one permanent "trial" route).

Laziness, poor planning, and/or a lack of priorities are the reasons for this problem. It's as simple as that.

Once the buses are bunched, it's too late. The best ways to combat it are 1) realistical and accurate schedules, and 2)enforcing on time terminal departure (i.e. adherence to those schedules). Given how barebones CTA office staff are getting, I wouldn't count on the problem being fixed too soon.

1) is the most important but also trickiest to implement in CTA's operating environment for two reasons.
a. Try driving the same street. Then drive it again. And again. Think it will take the same amount of time each trip? Not likely in Chicago traffic.
b. Traffic patterns are cyclical of course, and vary throughout the day. Adequate scheduling staff could be constantly updating schedules to make every run of every route have the best shot of actually adhering to its schedule by measuring the average speed and running time in very narrow time increments throughout the day on each street. This, of course, requires alot of manpower/staff in the Scheduling department, which CTA does not have.

Technological solutions to unbunch buses that are already bunched will only make the problem worse and more unbearable. As a previous poster hinted at, providing next-bus arrival information is the best (and only) thing to do given the circumstances.

What if the cta could use the technology to override lights like emergency vehicles do in some areas, which change the lights to their favor. That could help in poor traffic areas, but the only way to really, truly get rid of it is to use rail transit, i.e. streetcars and the el.

Certainly it's possible for traffic signals to be set-up to give an approaching bus priority. Portland, Oregon does this on a couple of routes.

However, in Portland, anything less than a 15 minute headway is "frequent" service, and most routes are spurs from downtown. What would happen if two routes with 5 minute headways intersect each other like in Chicago with it's abundence of crosstown routes?

Then there's also the problem that so few traffic signals have any kind of coordination of any kind. Most run on time schedules. There isn't much sophistication in the way traffic signals operate in Chicago. (Granted it's easier to impliment something more sophisticated in most other places, but Chicago is still lagging behind like a blue-coller, beer-bellied guy who hasn't made the switch from cassettes to cd's yet while others have already moved on to MP3's.

Real-time bus arrival time information available to the public is far easier to impliment. And they already have most of the hardware! Take a look at Portland's Transit Tracker (http://www.trimet.org/arrivals/index.htm). However, it does fail when the weather is bad because of two reasons: 1.) The travel time projections aren't smart enough to account for the weather. (It can adjust for days of the week, and times of day, but it's not up to adding in that variable of the weather -- yet.), and 2.) Portland sometimes puts buses on "snow routes" to bypass the hills, and the system freaks-out when buses leave their planned route.

Also, the data gathered by the GPS units allows close monitoring of various routes, and can identify trends. It's not unusual to see notices posted on the Trimet website that effective some date, certain trips on a certain route will be adjusted to increase schedule reliability. They'll update the online schedules, and the trip planner, but they won't neccessarily update the printed schedules, or the downloadable file for handhelds. But they do make those schedule adjustments.

Better supervison at the terminals is probably a good idea, too. It's one thing for a bus to fall behind because of traffic. It's another thing for it to leave the terminal late to begin with! If there's a problem with recovery time, and necessary breaks for the operators, then that needs to be addressed as well.

What if the cta could use the technology to override lights like emergency vehicles do in some areas

Huh? From my perspective, they already do this. It's called "running the red" and busses do it constantly, to the point of almost running people over in the crosswalk.

Rusty,
Good elaboration. There certainly is a wealth of data from the GPS systems, including running time along the routes, departures from terminals, etc. But manpower is still needed to crunch all that data into constantly-updated and realistic schedules a la Portland. CTA Schedules are generally busy chasing their tails just keeping up with this or that service change throughout the city (changes in hours of services, slightly increase in frequency, grant funding for a new route, etc. etc.) so they can't realy get in front of the problem and attack the scheduling problem with gusto.

I remember hearing that, about 10 years ago or so, the department in Chicago in charge of traffic lights & such (maybe signage as well) was about 3-5 people, while Evanston's equivalent department was like 15 people, which explains (surprising as it is, staff wise) that Chicago has no synchronized lights etc...