Chicago MetroMapr

By Chris Karr in Miscellaneous on Oct 18, 2006 7:35PM

All of us at the Chicagoist offices are huge fans of the city's public transit. Sure, it's stinky, and the schedules are polite fictions at best, but by God, it gets us to where we need to go without us having to worry about contributing to the world's problems by disproportionately consuming energy and fossil fuels. (We're also very pleased that we don't have to contribute to the insurance industry coffers, and that we're not fattening the belts of some anonymous banker by paying interest on a car loan.)

We're also a big fan of fun online sites here at the site. Our labs run off of Flickr and del.icio.us, so we're fully Web 2.0(tm) compliant. It's with this attitude that we found the latest Google Maps mashup, MetroMapr.

Now while we worry that vowelless-r notation (Flickr, Mapr, etc.) will be seen as a silly fad (like how we laugh at ".com" now), we appreciate web coders showing some love and overlaying colored lines where our beloved El runs with all the stops. It makes our life easier when we're looking for the shortest distance from a train station to wherever we're going. In all honesty, this is something that should be a part of Google Maps, but isn't. In the meantime, we'll be lobbying Google to show the El some love, and we'll be lobbying MetroMapr to show our buses some respect and get those routes online too.