Bus Spotting
The CTA started an experimental bus tracking system last year that let you log in and check where the busses were and how long you had to wait until the next one. When I first heard about this I was extremely excited. Unlike most technology that I get excited about this one actually had a chance of changing the way that I live. In particular, my new location is not particularly well placed to get to the El. I used to live a 10 minute walk which was no problem, but now it is closer to 30 and means that I pretty much always take the car downtown. This annoys me, and I have tried the busses. Coming back is trivial since the howard stop has a bunch of bus lines I can take, but going there is harder since those bus lines run on different streets. This bus tracker would allow me to look at the three possible lines and pick which street to walk to, thus making it much much more likely that I will ride the train instead of driving.
So why do I mention this now? It looks like the CTA board has decided to go ahead and install the system on all the bus lines. This is awesome. As we begin to enter a world of gasoline scarcity, improvements that make the public transportation system more usable are most welcome.
Dude, I sure could have used that when I lived down in Hyde Park.
It’ll probably also come in handy when the southbound Red/Brown/Purple extravaganza goes to single-track operation; I will most likely want to take a bus to work, then.
Check out http://nextbus.com which has most of San Francisco (and other municipalities) tracked - they’ve added electronic signs at the stops telling you the arrival times and have a nice mobile site.