I recently found myself on a nearly-empty Brown Line car during the early evening, when I realized that a man sitting next to me was masturbating. I kicked him and yelled at him to stop, which he did, and he left the train at the next stop. My immediate reaction was to feel relieved that I had so quickly recognized and taken control of the situation. And although I was grossed out, my prevailing feeling......

On Saturday, a select group of CTA Tattlers sat down for coffee with CTA President Ron Huberman to discuss the state of the CTA. This morning, CTA Tattler posted the first report from their meeting with Huberman, covering the various bus initiatives that were discussed on Saturday. During the meeting, Huberman also told the tattlers that the GPS Bus Tracker pilot program will be expanding to 20 new bus routes, which will be announced......

World's most expensive bullet point. CTA President Ron Huberman, quickly becoming our favorite public official, unveiled an epic improvement plan for the CTA yesterday. Whew! The 75-page .pdf outlines his plan, though questions like "where will this money come from" remain. Huberman says the slow zones are on their way to being eliminated, that he's increasing the efficiency of bus repairs, generating more non-ride money by wooing advertisers and vendors, and he promised that......

Watch us on WTTW's Chicago Tonight tonight at 7, or rebroadcast at 1:30 and 4:30 a.m. for you night owls. We'll be alongside esteemed colleagues Andrew from Gapers Block and Kevin from CTA Tattler. (Think of it as a reunion, except with me instead of Rachelle.) The blogger segment should go on around 7:30, and if at some point Phil Ponce notes that "blog" is short for "web log," everybody drink!......

Looks like CTA President Ron Huberman might be reading Chicagoist. Yesterday he admitted that he made a mistake by dismissing the "L" track shutdown last week as an "inconvenience in the Loop." Said Huberman, "We didn't communicate effectively or give people the reassurances they needed. It was scary. Passenger needs took a back seat. I apologize to our riders." Huberman also introduced measures aimed at ensuring that incidents like last week's are the exception, not......

Take a quick look through Flickr, and you'll see that the CTA is one of the most popular subjects for photographers' lenses. Interesting architecture, intriguing people, and a nice dose of urban decay all beg to be photographed. We were similarly inspired last weekend while waiting for a brown line train at the Belmont "L" stop. After taking a photo of the view toward the end of the platform, and two snapshots of a glimpse......

The week in CTA has started off in typical fashion: sad and disappointing. The traffic report we heard on the radio spoke of an "accident" on the Red Line at Wilson. We thought it was interesting to hear the CTA mentioned in a traffic report, but we know accident is code for suicide. Chicagoist hates to hear about that. Whatever inconvenience that might be for a commute, we are always reminded that the human lives......

A plan is in the works to widen the road going into O'Hare and to improve and modernize the People Mover trains inside the airport. Watch out CTA Tattler, CTA Stories is a new blog dedicated to telling stories of Chicago Transit Authority adventures. The difference? Everyone can blog their own stories at CTA Stories. Chicago Professionals for Youth is having a party at Elm Street Liquors on March 3 from 8:30 p.m. -......

Tom Sherman from fledgling Chicago tech site WindyBits filled up Mr. Fusion yesterday and traveled back in time to review nascent versions of your favorite Chicago websites. We're particularly taken with the proto-version of the Tribune (someone got a Flash book for their birthday), and the absolutely hideous, 1998 incarnation of the Sun-Times (image maps rule). Nobody escapes this internet version of their cool college friends finding their high school yearbooks, including yours truly. Tom......

Not to be outdone by a former editor, our own Rachelle "Chicagoist Prime" Bowden, in her non-pixellated form, will share the dais with CTA Tattler's Kevin O'Neill and Gapers Block jefe Andrew Huff on Wednesday's "Chicago Tonight." Phil Ponce will moderate a discussion with the three, asking them about our respective internet fiefdoms, how blogs disseminate information, the stories broken on the respective websites, and if Huff's sideburns have a life of their own.......

Despite a preponderance of stories lately, we swear we’re not trying to become Chicago’s next knitting blog. We swear. However, when we caught sight of these handy mittens on CTA Tattler today, we just had to mention them. Colleen Meagher, a Bostonian who runs the blog, Subway Knitter, developed some knitted mittens with a perfectly sized pocket to hold her Charlie Card (Boston’s equivalent of the Chicago Card/Chicago Card Plus). Ms. Meagher’s mittens are sadly......

Lots of CTA happenings: Five people were fired over the Blue Line derailment. Tomorrow is the deadline to submit your artwork for the Red and Brown Line expansions. CTA Tattler has some ideas on how to speed things up and is urging you to tell Carole Brown what you think. The Lyric Opera announced their new schedule. The number of people who died on IL roads last year was the fewest in 80 years.......

Chicagoist was one of a few local blogs to be featured in a recent Chicago Magazine piece. Proclaimed to be arbiters of information, we, along with Gaper's, Metroblogging Chicago, Beachwood Reporter and CTA Tattler, were quizzed on our journalistic bona fides and asked about what makes each of us unique. Obviously, blogs go beyond the idea of traditional journalism, which is why they're attractive to readers. Whether they're discussing topics that don't get as much......

If you're like us (and we bet you are — hell, you're reading the damned site) you surf the net all day. And when you surf the net all day, some pretty neat things come across your desk. We stumbled across this yesterday. It seems that the CTA Tattler scooped your star political writer here at Chicagoist (not that we do any real reporting, anyway), with a piece about 49th Ward Alderman Joe Moore's resolution......

We aren't. We thought it was pretty cool when we got on the Milwaukee bus for the first time ever and walked onto a holiday* wonderland of music, lights and decorations galore. We knew there was a holiday train that the CTA pimped out and sent around to different lines throughout the holiday season, but we had no idea that there were holiday buses. (Note: The holiday train schedule that is posted at the......

When we heard a CTA official was resigning, we thought we had a winner in our Dead Pool. Turns out that Chicago may be losing exactly the type of transit official we need. Susan Plassmeyer, CTA executive vice president of construction, engineering and facilities maintenance, will leave the CTA at the end of the month to take a position in alumni relations and development at Washington University in St. Louis. One aspect of Plassmeyer’s job......

Today’s CTA Tattler discusses this morning’s RedEye article on the oft-heard but rarely understood CTA public address system. The CTA promises that new fiber-optic cables will soon allow you to know exactly how slow the Red Line is moving today. The Tattler also gives another plug for its CTA wireless alerts system and the transit status website run by friend of Chicagoist Tony Coppoletta. The CTA itself plans on evaluating its online CTA Bus Tracker......

After six months of construction, the CTA Brown Line's Kedzie and Rockwell stations should have reopened this morning at 4:45 AM (if they didn't someone tell us). The CTA is still adding a few finishing touches like signage, more fencing, and ooh, a compass rose. The spiffy new stations feature glass station houses, new platforms, better lighting, and those nifty blue rubber edges that remind you to back up lest you get decapitated by a......

And not in a good way. Chicagoist, along with hundreds of other people, were forced to walk home tonight because of a fire on the rear car of a Blue Line train. No trains were running in either direction between Washington in the Loop and Damen Avenue. The alternate route is the #56 bus that runs up Milwaukee Avenue, but that was so packed that the drivers were not even stopping at the stops.......

Brown Line renovation continues to be a pain for riders, and now not just for those who live west of Western. The CTA is warning passengers that Red, Purple and Brown Line trains may run at ultra-slow speeds between Armitage and Addison in the coming months. As in slower than usual; possibly a lot slower than usual. The delays are a result of track improvements and new signal installations around the Fullerton and Belmont stations.......

CTA Tattler posted some fun pictures yesterday that a reader snapped at the revamped Jackson subway station. An information screen went rogue, revealing the software running beneath. From the looks of it, the monitor was just playing a PowerPoint presentation on Windows XP, but someone forgot to lock things down. Riders even got to see a helpful security popup letting them know that the computer wasn't running a firewall. Neat! This is red meat for......

Kevin O'Neil, CTA Tattler...

Remember, last week when those SHHH, the Society for HandHeld Hushing, http://www.coudal.com/Shhh.pdf">cards (PDF) to give rude cell phone users were all the rage? Or you may have seen these urban asshole notification cards.. Yesterday, CTA Tattler brought Switchblade Susie's "Don't Be Jack" cards to our attention. Inspired by everyone's favorite CTA ad campaign, Switchblade Susie (can you tell this is a LiveJournal link?) encourages El riders to hand out her cards to rude and inconsiderate......