CTA Bus Tracker to Expand
By Mark Boyer in News on Mar 24, 2008 3:15PM
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 this morning.
The only bus route to have adopted the tracker to this point is the #20 Madison route, which began in the summer of 2005. The goal of the Bus Tracker program is to eventually get the entire bus fleet off of schedules so that drivers don't have to stop and wait for scheduled stops and they can commit to running routes as fast as possible. And, according to the Trib, the system seeks to eliminate that maddening phenomenon that the CTA bus system has become synonymous with: clusterfuck bunching.
The way it works is: Each bus sends a radio signal every 15 seconds to the CTA Control Center, stating the location of the bus. Estimated travel times for the Madison line are available on a text-based website, and there is one message sign at the Madison & Jefferson bus shelter. ChicagoBus.org has a list of some of the routes that will be added to the Bus Tracker program.