CTA Tattler

More positive news, and signs of actual progress. People can slam Ron and the CTA for all they want (and I expect to see those comments below), but at least they're not sitting on their hands!

Ghost buses exist and always have. I don't know what the CTA is talking about. I know that if Lawrence is showing buses arriving in 7 minutes and 24 minutes at just about any stop there is probably a bus between those. I've found it to be true on any of the busy routes I ride. There are always exceptions but it happens enough that I can use the lack of information as well as the actual information to figure out if I'll be waiting long.

Stan, I second your comments. For whatever the reasons, the CTA has begun to show improvement under Huberman's leadership.

It's also a constant reminder of how poor a job Kruesi did during his 10-year stint. And now this neer-do-well Daley lackey is lobbying the D.C. crowd for transportation dollars? I guess blind loyalty to Hizzoner has its privileges, to the detriment of most everyone else.

"patience is required" would be a pretty fitting motto for the CTA.

At least the patience has paid off since Huberman got work done where he said he would.

There is a lot still being done and even more to go but to expect the infrastructure situation to turn around completely in a couple years after decades of neglect is unrealistic. Some inconvenience is inevitable.

Ghost buses can be very scary, not to mention that they are usually filled with Daley supporters:)

While the bus tracker is great, I still think that it needs a bit of tweaking. It's kind of annoying when a bus shows up as "due" on the tracker and yet takes 15 minutes to show up. It may have been a fluke, but the system might need to be a bit more pro-active about adjusting itself for traffic conditions.

I think Ron is doing a great job. We should all applaud him for the efforts he has put into fixing the mess that is the CTA.

Thank you Ron. Keep it up!

Not to be a thread hijacker here, but I am not sure wheter I have heard any discussion on this: Will the tracker be expanded to the trains?

I asked the CTA about a tracker on trains and this was their response:

Dear Ms. xyz--

For trains, we are exploring options, but do not have currently available funding for a train system.

Bus Tracker Project Team

I asked Kyra at RedEye about the electronic signs the CTA said they wanted to install on train platforms to show train times and advertising. She said the CTA was ready to go with the signs, but hadn't found an advertiser to fund them yet.

I never even thought of a Train Tracker website. That would be very useful on nights and weekends when the trains don't run as much.

I have also asked the CTA about a possible train tracking system back in June and they gave me a bunch of canned cut and paste stuff about how they're constantly striving to improve upon the train announcements over those hellishly staicky speakers and that they are "always look[ing] for ways to increase the amount of information available to our customers insofar as available technology and financial resources will allow."

So I guess that means for now, No Train Tracker. Can't have everything, I guess...

staicky = staticky

I have been wondering with 3-track scheduled to end at the end of 2008, will the Purple line be restored to the inner loop tracks as it used to run? I know when they started 3-track they said it was temporary, but they changed over all the signage at the loop stations, so I have a feeling we won't see it back.

Yes. Let's thank Ron for his great work on all the capital projects that are being completed.

Nevermind that capital projects don't happen overnight, and that being around for the last year and a half of a 5-10 year process doesn't entitle someone to the credit for the project. Ron's a cute guy with a nice smile, and impressive PowerPoint presentations, so we'll let him have the credit here.

So what new projects is he working on? What projects have been *started* since he's been around? And what kind of progress is he making on those projects?

Aggressive slow zone elimination isn't a project that's been running for 5 years. Heck, until the Blue Line derailment nobody had a clue just how badly off the system was.

The extensive work on the Red/Blue line slow zones and the decision to fast track completion of the Fullerton/Belmont platforms and trackage were his decisions.

Paul:

Word is that Purple will return to the clockwise inner loop at the end of three track (thank god...no more extra 20 minutes for the trip home while I ride all the way around the loop).

Interestingly enough, the other word is CTA planners were looking to "drop" the long rumored Brown/Orange through-routing combo (via Wells/Van Buren) at this time as well, but found that they really wouldn't save that many trainsets and had a big problem of missing Clark/Lake, so that's a no go.

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Aggressive slow zone elimination isn't a project that's been running for 5 years. Heck, until the Blue Line derailment nobody had a clue just how badly off the system was.
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Oh, please. Let's not rewrite history now.

As Deap Throat once said, "Follow the money." The trail leads to a time when Ron didn't even know what the fare on CTA was. (I'm not convinced he knows now without launching PowerPoint first, so maybe that's a bad example.)

I am on a ghost bus as I post. I checked Bus Tracker and was informed no buses were arriving for 18 minutes. Yet, the bus pulled up three minutes later. I boarded the ghost bus and now wonder if I've slipped into another dimension. You know the one where the coyote talks like Johnny Cash....

"CTA planners were looking to "drop" the long rumored Brown/Orange through-routing combo (via Wells/Van Buren) at this time as well, but found that they really wouldn't save that many trainsets and had a big problem of missing Clark/Lake, so that's a no go."

It sure is swell that so many insiders hang out here, but I have no idea what this means. Anyone willing and considerate enough to translate? Thanks.

If memory serves, Bob S., the idea was to have the Brown Line become an Orange Line train after it served the west/south outer loop and Orange to Brown serving the south/west inner loop on the ride north. I love the idea of the hybrid line being called the Bronge or Orown Line. The Midwood, the Ravenway.

To further translate, by combining the overlapping Brown and Orange Lines, it would initially seem that you'd be able to cut the number of trains (trainsets) needed because only one train would be needed in the overlapping area (the Loop) instead of two.

However, with the exception of rush hour, once you do the math, it doesn't quite work out to be much of a savings at all.

And if the combined line only ran on the south and west sides of the Loop (oposite of the Green Line on the north and east sides), it would miss Clark/Lake, and a key transfer point between the Blue Line. Also, Green Line connections would only be at Roosevelt, with nothing convinent for people going from the north side of the Brown/Orange combo, to the west side of the Green Line. (An extra transfer to a Pink, notwithstanding.)

So no sense in moving forward if there's neither enhanced convinence, nor any significant cost savings.

I thought the slow-zone elimination project started under Huberman. Kreusi had previously been saying it would take five years (or something ridiculous like that) to fix the Blue Line.

I remember Kreusi saying it would take at least ten years and $100 million in new capital to fix the slows. History will probably prefer to remember RonH's reallocation of existing capital toward slow zone elimination rather than dwell on the unwieldy and un-proofread PowerPoints. Perhaps it's all vaguely reminiscent of Nixon in China, but at least the trains are moving faster during peak usage and it doesn't smell like burning garbage in the subway nearly as much as it used to.

[So what new projects is he working on? What projects have been *started* since he's been around? And what kind of progress is he making on those projects? ]

I don't understand this reasoning. As you say, he's been in charge for a year and a half. What kind of progress do you expect to see on new projects that take 5-10 years?

Now, I'm not ready to anoint the guy Jesus or anything, either. But the progress lately has been undeniable.

Thanks, Martha and Rusty.

So this morning I kept getting "There is no service scheduled at this time for this stop" (or something very similar) for my corner to pick up the 147. Was this outage across the bus tracker system? That's a different message you see than when there just aren't any busses approaching in the next half-hour or so.

Bus Tracker seems to go down system-wide occasionally. It was down most of Monday. I wonder if it's a problem with the Google interface. I don't remember this happening during the initial rollout.

I'm quickly losing faith in the tracker system. Twice in the past week I've been burned by an 80 bus that the tracker told me was 10 minutes away. I live three minutes from my stop. The bus has been up to 30 minutes late. And now that school is back in session, it's packed with LHS kids by the time it gets to Damen.

What gives? This route was golden all summer. No long waits. Hell, I didn't even have to use the tracker. Does the influx of students make things this bad that buses are delayed over a half hour?

mike,
Short answer is yes. CTA runs remarkably fast and on schedule on days when ridership and traffic are very low.

The other day I tracked the route 148 to ge to work near 9am on a weekday ('rush only route). It said one was 10 minutes away. so i hustled over to clarendon and irving. I refreshed my blackberry and it was 5 minutes. 3. 2...... and then i refresh again--- Nothing!!!!! the bus disappeared completely off the map (well it was the text version)! It became 'no scheduled buses at this stop.' I didn't see anything up the street at all, either, where if it was 2 minutes away I would have seen something. i walked up Clarendon and nothing. So apparently this bus time warped from Clarendon somewhere to lord knows where. great job bus tracker. i had to take a taxi.

Anonymous, that much is obvious. I'm talking about rush hour buses, so the ridership and traffic aren't low to begin with. I'll stipulate that the influx of students is bound to have an effect on service, but I've been riding this bus for a while and have never seen such a pronounced degeneration in service.

Irrespective of all this, it doesn't account for the fact that the bus tracker has been off ... by a lot. Which is frustrating.

In regards to the new signals they plan to install in the Loop... Is the work they are doing on Wells between Lake and Randolph related to this? There are metal stairs that either have been recently installed or recently rehabbed and painted bright yellow that I've noticed in the past few months. On top it looks like new steel framework that could support a platform or a signal station. Anyone know anything about this?

mike, I've noticed that traffic along Irving Park gets bad at the beginning of the school year, then settles back by Dec or so. Thus screwing up the buses. And of course Cubs games wreak havok in the afternoon...
Not that it ran that great all summer. At least when I was taking it. And yes, we ran into the off-schedule bus, too. Said 7 min for the 80 and 8 min for the X80. The 80 was early and the X was fairly late. But I don't have a PDA or whatever they're called, so I haven't the slightest how well it works. (and before you ask--someone else at the stop was checking hers and passing along the info)

The work on the old Randolph and Wells platform is being done to accommodate the new signal gear since the opposite side is already full and they'll need to install it before removing the old system.

Cool, thanks for the info g. It is as I suspected...

The Bus Tracker system is laughable at best.

It is an electronic pacifier to keep you distracted and busy while the bus is lost in traffic. Particularly interesting when TWO (or THREE) buses show up and none of them are reported on Bus Tracker.

I ride the #63 bus each day and between 25% and 50% of the buses on that route do not even appear in the bus tracker. You can be sitting on a bus at the Orange Line station, launch bus tracker on your BlackBerry and it will not even show your bus number. Even more fun when Bus Tracker tells you that a bus is "due" and you don't see a bus for 15 minutes or more.

The Bus Tracker is NOT the solution guys.

I've had the exact opposite results, Ed. In fact, today I ran for a bus well before I saw it; I caught it, because I knew it was going to be close. Here at work, shortly before I leave, I open both the ETA page for the stop I use and the map for my neighborhood, and I can see what busses are where; that lets me estimate -- pretty closely, as it turns out -- which busses are going to be full, which ones will have seats, and even which ones will pass others at stops. If the two displays suggest I've got enough time, I walk down to a stop a half-mile or so before mine and improve my chances of getting a seat even more.

I'm not saying you're wrong about your experiences, understand; I'm saying neither of our experiences extrapolates.

Unfortunately, it looks like we're going to go two months in a row without any routes being added to the Tracker. Maybe I'll suggest that as a Ron question...