CTA Has 99 Problems But The Web Ain't One

By Marcus Gilmer in News on Dec 16, 2008 7:45PM

The CTA today unveiled their revamped website and our first impression is holy hell, this is sooooo much nicer than the crappy, old design which looked like it was a GeoCities page from 1996. The new easier-to-use and much better organized interface seems to have taken a page from the iPhone design, icon-wise. The organization of the train lines and buses also makes it much easier to find what you're looking for. Now, when you select a bus or train schedule, rather than automatically opening a PDF of the route information, it takes you to a new, revamped homepage for each route/line which contains concise information for each route/line and from which you can choose to download the PDF at your leisure.

Our favorite new detail? The Alert page. Instead of scrolling through what sometimes seemed like an infinite and unorganized amount of text just to locate one alert on the old page, the new system arranges alert by lines and routes, making it much easier to find that Red Line or #11 reroute you're looking for. The site has also gotten with the times and each train and bus route has an RSS alert feed you can subscribe to, supplementing their earlier announced email alert system.

One additional stocking stuffer for Brown Line residents: the Damen station reopens this weekend.

The CTA still has many, many issues, but as of today, its website is, thankfully, no longer one of them.