Why the long-overdue CTA train tracker isn’t all that overdue
The Chicago Brown Line stop
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This week, the CTA quietly rolled out an extremely early version of its long-in-development train tracker system, making real-time information about upcoming train arrivals available to riders. Plenty of Chicagoans may say it’s long overdue, but The A.V. Club thinks this is one case where we as a city should instead be preemptively thankful.
Train trackers are not all that common.
The idea might seem obvious, but systems to monitor local train operations as they happen (including from locations outside of rail stations) only exist in a handful of major metropolitan areas: the Baltimore-D.C. corridor, Miami, the San Francisco Bay area, and the Philadelphia-centric SEPTA. While it’s easy to be jealous of the Baltimores and Oaklands of the world, large-scale, up-to-the-moment rail monitoring as a whole is still a fairly nascent technology. It’s also easy to complain about Chicago’s resistance to just about anything, but there’s actually not much there for the city to resist in the first place.
We just got the best bus tracking system in the country.
Mobile-friendly, multi-interface, citywide, near-real-time, and released to any interested developers—the CTA's Bus Tracker is a pretty amazing transit accessory. Even for all the bluster about the greatness of New York’s public transportation network, its bus tracker is still in its infancy and only available along the pilot route. At the same time, while plenty of agencies across the country boast trackers of their own, none match the sheer volume of data while providing the smoothness of the CTA’s interface. None.
When all the news is bad news, the good news suddenly becomes great news.
Is a new presentation of old information a fair trade for massive service reductions? Absolutely not, but in a time of constant cutbacks, perhaps something as simple as transportation data delivery can be viewed not as a long-overdue right, but instead as a small victory. Assuming, of course, they actually go through with it this time.
