CTA Tattler

Has anyone ever actually used the Lincoln bus?

Yes, Adam, especially when all the track work made the Brown completely unreliable on weekends. The other riders seemed to be using the 11 too. Who knows, maybe they were just holograms.

I've used it, too, actually, but only three or four times.

So, I read the story on the Trib's "Breaking News" site about Norwegians' fascination with Bus Tracker. I'm not sure if this constitutes breaking news, but I'll leave that alone. In offering a reason for the Norwegian traffic, a CTA rep said this: "Many people just like to watch buses on their computer, even if they aren't going anywhere," CTA spokeswoman Noelle Gaffney said. The problem with the pronoun "they" is that it's difficult to tell if it refers to the buses or the people watching the buses.

stillwaiting: "I've never had any problems whatsoever with the #16, #25, or #42 buses"

Of course none of those routes exist today.

I'm kind of worried because I no longer see the information about the new routes on the bus tracker website. I hope this doesn't mean the original posting by the CTA was in error. I'd really love to see the #22 and the #36 available on the bus tracker, since I live only a block from both routes.

>The queues were so neat & orderly, newspaper articles were written about it.

That was still going on 2 years ago at the Logan Square Blue Line station. Probably still is, though I'm not passing there as often.

I don't know how many people recognize that many routes are actually right on schedule much of the time in the late evening. I would actually time the California/Kedzie back when I used to take it regularly at 9:30 or so.

Ted,
Isn't that "unwelcome monstrosity" at Devon/Rockwell gonna have a whole bunch of indoor parking spots? i.e. a net increase in off-street parking spots for the area? What am I missing?

I live in Bucktown and my office is in Lincoln Park. I would LOVE to see any east/west bus that comes close to either of these neighborhoods on the bus tracker.

My current commute consists of waiting anywhere from 2-30 minutes for an east bound North Avenue bus, then waiting another 2-30 minutes to transfer to a north bound Halsted bus. My total commute typically takes around 45 minutes--including wait times. My life would change incalculably if I could track any bus(North Ave or Armitage or even Fullerton) to get get me East...

I think its ridiculous that there isn't 1 single bus that's tracked for the whole Bucktown/Wicker Park/ Logan Square area...??

I had a very similar experience with the 147, Rusty -- a 45-minute wait after which three buses showed up. The front one was packed, the middle one was empty, and the back one, the one I got on, the driver was really angry with me for passing up the other two (which I could do only because she didn't make it through the red light the middle driver ran). I suspect the story can be told about nearly every bus route in the system.

[Actually it hardly carries any passengers, often, it's the smaller bus with only a front door assigned to it...]

Not that you're wrong, necessarily, but I haven't seen one of those short single-door buses on the 96 in the year I've lived in Rogers Park.

I take it now and again to the Lincolnwood mall, and while I wouldn't describe it as a busy route, most of the seats are filled between Clark and Western.

50 Damen lately seems to have a few Ghost busses in the system. but still more reliable than when there was NO tracker

" I'm not sure if this constitutes breaking news, but I'll leave that alone. In offering a reason for the Norwegian traffic, a CTA rep said this: 'Many people just like to watch buses on their computer, even if they aren't going anywhere'"

Or perhaps they are not Norwegians after all. The first (and as of this time only) comment on that article offers what seems to me to be a pretty good technical explanation as to why these people probably are right here in Chicago. It really seems doubtful to me that there is some factor we don't know about that is causing so many people from that country to not only visit the bustracker page but also spend time looking around other portions of the CTA site. I suppose its possible that someone on a popular blog in Norway, for whatever reason, posted a link to the site and that could explain the numbers. But that wouldn't seem to me to give any reason why 75% of these people then continue to other parts of the CTA website. When I first read that article, my first reaction was that this was a rare Jon Hilkevitch article that didn't contain any significant problems. But that poster has convinced me that this thought was premature. And, of course, if I were actually writing an article about this the strangeness of the numbers would have given me pause before anyone mentioned. And if I was a reporter at the Tribune I would assume there are people in the newsroom knowledgable about technology, such as technology reporters who I think do exist there, who I would have talked to before I filed the story. If not (or if so and these discussions were inconclusive) I would have called an expert in internet infrastructure and asked if there was something to expain this. I guarantee you that I would not have written an article after simply taking a call from a CTA PR employee and listening to these statistics. The Tribune will probably need to place a correction in Wednesday's paper.

Since the Tribune tends to create multiple versions of the same article with seperate comments pages, I should probably link it so there is no confusion: http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2009/01/norwegians-cta-bus-tracker.html

Tim (South Side): My reason for a split at 63rd is so people will get on the Green Line. If enough people did so, then maybe service would increase there. I take it a lot to 63rd & then take a 4 to U of C Hospital. When the weather is better, I'll ride my bike that distance. That's why I would have the overlap, a lot of people go to the hospital.

Plus, make it a free transfer at 63rd for these two routes & any others that are way too long, only.

Any news on when the Kimball bus will be added?

I was probably counted as one of those visitors from Norway, since I use Opera Mini on my mobile. Sorry to disappoint, but I was in Chicago when I used the bus tracker.

The post says the Kimball bus is in the batch to be added this month.

I'm not sure why anyone would complain about the NB 147 - in the evening, this bus stops outside my work at Michigan and South Water literally every two minutes.

I don't know about Norwegians, but there have been many times I've loaded up the Bus Tracker and let it run just to watch the buses move around, especially back in the much better days before Google Maps.

The latest version of the Norwegian story on the Trib's website has one comment after it that suggests the Opera Mini connection. Mystery solved. It's comforting to know that CTA bus traffic isn't really being monitored closely by bored Norwegians.

The quotation from Noelle Gaffney has been changed to remove that ambiguous pronoun that appeared in the original "story." It now reads "even if they are not planning a trip" rather than "even if they aren't going anywhere." I guess when a journalist is in pursuit of a hot story like this it's ok not to quote your sources correctly the first time.

BuckTown Boy,

There is the Western bus that goes right through Bucktown, Wicker, Park and Logan Square that is available on BusTracker.

As for the other viewers checking out our site, some it is probably due to curiousity, but others might be checking out our site to implement one of their own in their respective city. Or their computers could be hacked and the IP addresses are spoofed... :)

So because the Opera web browser is made in Norway, it assigns people's phones Norweigian IP addresses? That doesn't make sense to me.

The Norwegians love the Bus Tracker:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-cta-bus-tracker-box-13-jan13,0,6537731.story

Adam -
It's not that the browser was made in Norway, it is because until recently the Opera Mini browser used a proxy server that was in Norway (with a Norwegian IP Address). The CTA website would see hits from Norway anytime anyone used Opera Mini to look at the bus tracker. It is just the way that Opera Mini works. I believe that the server translates the web pages into a different format for the Mini browser.

It is also possible to use a proxy on your desktop web browser. If you choose a proxy server in a different country, it will look like you browsed a website from that country.

m, you crack me up. :)

I'm happy the 22 and the 36 have been added, as there's a stop right outside my office and it will be nice to not have to freeze/sweat my butt off at various points of the year waiting for either. Yay, CTA.

It is indeed sorta uncanny that on the occasion I need to take a bus - generally any time I'm not going straight home after work - it's not a bus that's on the Bus Tracker. The addition of the 22 and the 36 have improved this anomaly, thankfully.

Add my vote to the growing pile of 'add the 66, please' scraps. My doctor is in Streeterville and I live in Logan Square. I take either the 66 or the 65 to the Blue line to get home once a week, and sometimes it is just awful standing out there in all kinds of weather. There's not even a shelter at this particular stop (McClurg and Grand).

So yeah, adding the 66 and the 65 would be nice, as well as the Fullerton and Armitage buses.

#22 and #36 on bus tracker...really? Woo Hoo!!! (from a grateful East Lakeview commuter)

The 69 is a spectacularly reliable route; one I used about 5 years ago when living near O'Hare airport. Check out the route map and you'll see it makes a 20 minute loop between the Cumberland Blue Line station, East River Road, Lawrence, and Cumberland. Fantastic on-time performance and probably the shortest route in the CTA system.

I saw the short bus on the 96 within the last week.
Yesterday I saw a regular one.
Who knows what's in the mind of the North Park garage manager?
Only the Shadow knows!

CTAismylife: ;-)

I, too, use Opera Mini, and if the CTA's stats are counting individual hits, I'm probably personally responsible for several hundred of them.

Godd natt!

There must be a lot of 147s that aren't on the tracker and that go somewhere else after South Water, because they sure aren't reaching the Tribune Tower, which is the next stop, every two minutes., and the tracker doesn't think they're headed there. In better weather, I often walk from the Tribune Tower down to Randolph to beat a little bit of the crowd and have a marginally better chance at a seat, and I don't really see them every two minutes down there either.

I know of one really reliable route: the #24. It does go downtown, but nobody really rides it. 30 or 40 years ago before the Dan Ryan Red Line was built, it ran 24/7 but nowadays it's just weekdays and even at rush hour, running every 15 minutes, it barely fills up. Not that I mind. It's nice to have a guaranteed seat. I hope they don't cut it, but as evidenced by plans to bring the 31st Street bus back in the next couple years, the CTA seems to be improving, not cutting services in Bridgeport, so I'm not worried.

I find it pretty unfortunate that the Tribune story is still on the website unalterted. It seems to be abundantly clear that the people metnioned were not in Norway. Simple research that would probably take less than 10 minutes should have discovered this. And if the Tribune wishes to correct it that is all that would be neccessary to confirm that they were wrong. Hopefully sometime soon I will write a nasty e-mail to them about this. But unfortuenetely, I am so disgusted with the unbelievable pattern of laziness in Hilkevitch's journalism that I will want to make that e-mail very extensive. And because of that I will probably procastinate and not end up sending it. So perhaps some of you may want to e-mail the Tribune and give links to their own comment section, this post (its best to give a link directly to the second page), and/or the story on Chicagoist where dozens of people are mentioning that the opera servers seem to be the clear explanation. Here is a good place to start: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-newspaperemail,0,4974145.htmlstory

Actually, this page is probably a better place to start: http://www.chicagotribune.com/about/custom/contact/chi-contact-us,0,6155005.htmlstory

Just use the "local news" e-mail address. I only linked to that other page because I just happened to have it in another tab. A recent post on this thread (combined with a recollection of something that poster has stated before) caused me to look at.

Oops. That should be "at it".

>>>
I find it pretty unfortunate that the Tribune story is still on the website unalterted.
<<<

It's appropriate to update a news story until it's published. It's appropriate to update anything to correct spelling errors and typos even after publishing. It's appropriate to update anything to reflect corrections that would rise to the level of being published, as long as it's noted what was corrected and why.

But it's not appropriate to make substansive changes to a columnist's column after publication even if it turned out that the whole column was based on false assumptions. The appropriate venue for something like that is a follow-up column.

History, and opinions of history should be preserved. I'm sure there are many columnists who wrote things in 2002 to support the decision to go to war who found out later that their opinions were based on misinformation (or even poor research). I'm sure there are plenty of them who would love to go back and "correct" their columns.

Given that the reader comments are there to add context to the column, there's really no need to even consider the idea of posting a corrected column.

However it does seem to be a significant enough of a mistake for JH to address it in another column. While his error shouldn't be fixed, and history not rewritten for his sake, the error should be addressed.

That might, in fact, be a good point if indeed the article was a column. But it is not. It is a news article. Jon Hilkevitch is not a columnist. He is a reporter. He is sometimes misidentified as a columnist because the Tribune has a weekly monday article from him. The Tribune itself may indeed refer to that as a column. And, in the past, it may have ventured into substance that would ordinarally be considered more of a columnist's territory rather than a reporter's (but they have pretty much gotten away from that in the past year or two). In any case, this article wasn't part of that monday "column" anyway. It was published on the website and the newspaper as a straight article. And you can see in the link I provided earlier that he is referred to as a reporter, not a columnist. Other people, such as Eric Zorn, are referred to as columnists.

I will open the can of worms.
If anybody here actually visits my W-WW bookmark page (what's in the link), they will find _lots_ of links to sites with proxy servers and judges.
Those can be used by _anybody_ to make him|her self appear to be from _somewhere other than the U.S.A._
I do not necessarily use it when surfing Chicago transit W-WW sites - but I could.
And if I did, I could appear to be a surfer from China, Indonesia, Japan, Brazil, Argentina, *Poland*, or India.
I convinced somebody on a Blackberry unit to visit my bookmark page one night. Later that evening, when checking my traffic, I found his access. I checked his Internet Protocol Address. It turns out that all Blackberry I.P. Addresses are in _Canada_.
(Contact me and I shall give you the URL for investigating I.P. Addresses.)
But I repeat that the reason for routes not appearing on Bus Tracker is that they are serviced by garages which, until this month, were not *fully stocked* with buses which had the Bus Tracker hardware.

Bus 66 please!

I don't live on campus downtown anymore, but when I did I came to the conclusion that the 29 bus is a myth and/or shows up only when I don't need it. Every time new buses are added and the 29 bus isn't one of them, it proves my theory that the bus doesn't actually exist.

Another Avondale/Logan Square resident, here. I think the many commuters I see on the east-bound Diversey bus in the a.m. will be surprised to hear that they don't need to go to Lincoln Park! Many students at DePaul live west of the river, since the rents are more affordable. The east-bound Diversey and Fullerton buses are also full of children attending LP High, Agaziz, Oscar Mayer, and adults who need to connect to a north/south L line.

My vote for the most troubled east/west route is the Chicago 66, though. Last winter, I waited at the Chicago Blue line stop every weekday for two months, while trying to get to Northwestern Hospital for radiation treatment. It wasn't uncommon for four or five inhumanly packed buses to pass before I could fight my way on. Dear CTA, there's been a wee bit of a population boom in Humboldt Park and Noble Square since you last assessed this route...and they're mostly young professionals trying to get to the Loop.