http://www.chicagotribune.com/techno...l=chi-news-hed
Where's the darn bus?
Commuter's computer could hold answer as CTA tests satellite-tracking system
Published May 8, 2006
Looking, waiting, stewing.
Commuters crane their necks over the edge of curbs at bus stops or on train platforms, wondering when their ride will come.
Many factors--accidents, mechanical breakdowns, waiting for track signals--account for why printed transit schedules and actual operations are often minutes and miles apart.
It would be wonderful if the system were more punctual. But the helpless feeling of not knowing whether the wait will be three minutes or a quarter-hour is what ranks among the top complaints of Chicago-area transit riders. It is a major reason many commuters drive to work on congested roads even though traveling by bus or train might be quicker.
Satellite technology may soon ride to the rescue, helping to eliminate some of the suspense in transit mystery trips. It might even prevent the knots that occur when buses become bunched together on one part of a route.
Other world-class cities have used satellite-based tracking systems for more than a decade to inform waiting passengers exactly when their bus or train will arrive.
More than 2,000 electronic countdown signs have been installed in London showing the projected arrival times that buses on different routes will reach a stop. A similar system is used in the San Francisco area on all the light-rail routes and on several bus lines.
Here at home, the Chicago Transit Authority, Pace and the Regional Transportation Authority are taking baby steps.
The CTA plans to unveil this summer a next-bus countdown system on the No. 20 Madison bus route.
In late June or early July, CTA No. 20 Madison customers will be able to use their computers and wireless handheld devices that access the Internet to track the real-time locations of buses and get the estimated elapsed time until the next bus reaches a selected bus stop.
It will also give the estimated arrival time of the bus directly behind the one coming on the 10-mile-long Madison route, where scheduled intervals between buses range from about four minutes during rush hours to up to 20 minutes at night.
Riders can sign up to receive pop-up alerts on their computers or other devices when a bus is a designated number of minutes from arriving at a selected stop. So riders can stay in their office or home until the bus approaches.
One electronic sign providing next-bus information will also be posted for testing at a busy bus stop west of the downtown, officials said.
Text messaging of bus information to cell phones, pagers and other devices would be phased in later. Real-time information would also be available to phone operators assisting customers at the RTA's travel information center.
A separate rail program designed to accurately count down the arrival of the next train for passengers waiting on platforms has been mired in reliability problems during five years of testing, often incorrectly reporting the number of minutes that the next train would arrive.
A replacement train-tracking system will be undergoing tests through at least the end of the year, officials said.
The next-train testing is taking place at the CTA rail stations at O'Hare International Airport, Midway Airport, Cumberland Avenue on the O'Hare branch of the Blue Line and Davis Street on the Purple Line in downtown Evanston.
Once the kinks are worked out of the $3 million pilot project, the data-communications system could be expanded in the future to tell commuters who drive to CTA or Metra park-and-ride stations whether parking spaces are available before they leave home, officials said.
"Our long-term goal is to put together a regional system that gives real travel times to riders connecting between the CTA, Metra and Pace," said Duana Love, manager of oversight and technology development at the RTA.
"So if you are a commuter transferring from the `L' to a Pace bus and there is a danger you will not make your connection on time, we will send you a message offering alternate connections," Love said.
The CTA bus-tracking system is designed to spot the locations of the agency's 2,000 buses, which are equipped with global-positioning system devices, and provide updates of each vehicle's position every 15 seconds, said John Flynn, CTA vice president of technology management.
Color-coded icons representing each bus on a route map would indicate whether a bus is on time, running ahead of schedule or late.
Dispatchers at the agency's operations center and bus supervisors on the streets would use the information to relieve bus bunching and improve service by radioing or messaging drivers to get buses back on schedule and spread out.
"The software gives us a powerful new tool to respond to bus-bunching and see what is happening along an entire route. You can tell where the gaps in service are and what the reliability looks like," said Wai-Sinn Chan, special assistant to the executive vice president of transit operation at the CTA.
That is the hope. But it is a complicated process that relies on computer programs and logarithms to not only tell where each bus is now, but also where it will be in several minutes and later, accounting for traffic flow and other factors.
If the experiment generates reliable data in testing throughout 2006, the system would be expanded over years to the CTA's 150 other bus routes on more than 2,200 route miles, officials said.
One million of the 1.5 million rides that the CTA provides each weekday are on buses. Two-thirds of the CTA's bus routes travel through the downtown.
Work on the $1.3 million bus pilot project began in 2002. CTA officials estimate it would cost at least $25 million to expand the next-bus system to all routes.
"It would be nice to know when I walk out the door whether a bus is coming shortly or that I just missed the bus and another one won't be along for 20 minutes," said Drew Weller, a North Side resident who rides the No. 50 Damen bus on days that he doesn't walk to the Brown Line rail station at Addison Street.
"You wait, you wait, you wait. You keep looking up the street. It's really annoying," said Weller, 35, a technology project manager at Northern Trust Global Investments.
Pace is using the bus-tracking data internally to improve the performance of the suburban bus system, officials said.
The scheduled wait times between buses can extend to 45 minutes or more during off-peak periods on some of Pace's longer routes, leading to long waiting times at bus stops.
Pace last year briefly provided real-time bus-tracking information on its Web site, but the agency pulled the service because of poor accuracy and reliability, officials said.
Pace plans to try again soon, and to also post the bus information on electronic kiosks that will be deployed at shopping malls and other high-traffic locations in the suburbs.
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