CTA Tattler

You need train tracker before this will be truly amazing. It seems to me that the displays simply try to give you the time in which the next train is "scheduled" to arrive.

Cool signs! Go Cardinals!

I happened to be at the Addison Stop on the evening of Opening Night and we saw these signs and were amazed and surprised.

The "next train arrival" update made the wait bearable.

Way to go CTA!!!

I'll be quite happy when these signs make appearances at transfer stations. Standing at State/Lake waiting longer for my Green Line transfer to Clinton than it would take to walk the distance is sort of annoying.

^ I agree. Nothing ticked (no longer ride) me off more then when I would see 4 empty brown line trains go by before 1 green line. I'm sure the digital signs would have made the wait at least somewhat bearable.

It will be really helpful at stations like Roosevelt when you're on the elevated platform trying to get to a stop like Adams/Wabash. You see an Orange line coming, but should you let is pass because there is a green line due in 2 minutes?? What about the redline downstairs? Thats where it really helps.

Who is the vendor for Chicago card and Chicago Card Plus? Their technology is definetly flawed. I have had issues with my card working this past week and the card is only a month old. Nothing appears to be wrong with the card. The operators seem to know about the issue and always say " warm it up with your hands" or does it have a crack in it etc. Either way I gotta get a new one because it is so annoying when it doesn't work. I will not pay the $5 either since the card doesn't work. If this is happening a lot and CTA has to continously replace the cards, I am sure it adds up to a small fortune.

I looked at the Addison train arrival screens while while on the Red line this morning. There was an immediate follower coming around the curve at Sheridan and I was suprised to see the signs were accurately indicating the next 95th bound train was approaching. I cannot wait until stations I use everyday have them. It seems like at this pace it is going to be a year or more. Bummer.

The ones at 47th took a couple of weeks to "settle in", but now they're really accurate. And it's based on real-time tracking as far as I know, because sometimes the numbers will stay the same or even go up if something's stalled. It's definitely not from the schedule.

I probably missed this, but is there any reason they couldn't have a train tracker? Basically the same thing as bus tracker but for trains. It would be cool to be able to get an update on the next train arriving on your cell phone.

Isn't a "train tracker" in the works when the entire system gets the arrival signs and the kinks get worked out? Metro has it and its lovely except they don't have a wireless app so it's a bit cumbersome on the run.

http://www.wmata.com/rider_tools/pids/real_time_arrivals.cfm

I'm looking forward to arrival times for the subway so I know whether or not it's worth my while to pay the less-talented "performers" to stop playing until my train comes.

I'm willing to bet there's a train tracker. Back in a journalism class in 1979, I interviewed the then-head of Boston's MBTA, who was nice enough to give me a tour of their building. And back in 1979, one room had a wall-sized display that showed every train on the system. (If I remember right, it also showed the status of every signal on the system, alerting the control room to problems.)

If the CTA doesn't have anything like that a full 30 years later, something's really wrong.

So the LED signs they spent millions on really are just to tell us the date and time?

I wish they would put a LCD at street level so I could run if a train is approaching.

@Tim... you poor things that don't have the "attention customers" announcements that you can hear from the mezzanine. They're so helpful. And, speaking of, I was at Garfield Green today and there was a VERY different voice doing that announcement. Same wording, but she sounded like a kindergarten teacher.

They were also just installing the signs at Sox-35 on the Red Line today, so I guess the baseball stations are the next step of the pilot.

Jessi, Addison has the announcements too, but I can never hear if it's saying inbound or outbound clearly enough. Sometimes I can't hear it at all from street level.

Tim, Davis station in Evanston has that, and its pretty nice for knowing if you should hurry through the turnstiles (although i wish it would differentiate loop-bound and howard-bound)

JC: The Chicago Cards are a massive mistake for the CTA. Bus drivers routinely let people on without paying if the card doesn't "touch" correctly the first time, which also seems to be a routine event. And the poor bus drivers who do try to make sure that a CC user keeps 'touching' until the fare is paid is often rewarded with an argument about whether or not the fare has already been paid, since the thing makes more or less the same damned beep either way. Bureaucratic pride is the only explanation I can think of for the CTA's insistence on retaining a technology that slows down bus boarding and results in less fare collection.

And yes, if you're an honest passenger, then it's a bad deal for you too -- the cards tend to break and then you have to spend $5 to get a new one. (If you're not an honest passenger, of course, the instances on which you get board buses without paying because you're carrying a CC will more than make up for the periodic $5 fee.)

[And the poor bus drivers who do try to make sure that a CC user keeps 'touching' until the fare is paid is often rewarded with an argument about whether or not the fare has already been paid, since the thing makes more or less the same damned beep either way.]

The obvious solution here, of course, is to put the touch pads over by the other fare collection equipment, so that riders can more easily see for themselves if the card read or not.

In the new New Flyer articulateds, you can at least see the customer display when you touch the card. This is an improvement over the old NABI atriculateds, where you just had to guess whether the card read or not. But it still makes it easy to get confused.

In other words, it's not the cards that are the problem, it's the UI.

What would REALLY be nice would be if they could install one of these 'next train' signs inside Reckless Records on Madison. This way, I'd know when I had to leave to go up to the Madison/Wabash platform...

The London tube had similar next train information 19 years ago or more. It is great to get into the modern age in Chicago.

The Harlem station on the O'Hare Blue Line “L” has the vocal (and visual) train announcements.

All the train platforms in Tokyo, Japan let you know what is the next train due at that station [although when it is running late, it doesn't inform you the precise time it will arrive], its terminus, and the number of cars in the train.