Getting Around
In January, the nonprofit Neighbors Project launched a feature allowing CTA riders to use their email-enabled cell phones to text-message the CTA about their problems and concerns regarding Chicago's transit system. What a great idea to keep the agency accountable--in real time.
Getting Around
Last night the folks over at Chicago's groovy car-sharing company, Zipcar, hosted a movie benefit at the opulent, old Music Box Theatre Southport Avenue. The main feature: Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.
Getting Around
Would you like 'L' delays and cram? Not during rush hour, Frankie man. I do not like them on the 'L'. I do not like them very well.
Getting Around
Throughout the CTA's Brown Line reconstruction project, it's been no secret that the agency planned to reduce north side service on the Red, Brown, and Purple lines from four tracks to three during construction at the Belmont and Fullerton stations this spring. However, even for the CTA, the ineptit
Getting Around
This weekend, Devyn and I took a 35-mile trip through the Chicago suburbs with Zipcar. Using the for-profit car sharing service was a much more pleasant, customer-friendly experience than using the nonprofit I-Go service that my job uses. Here's why.
Getting Around
It doesn't take a grad school education to figure out where you want to go before you get there. And to pick up a map, or a phone, or a laptop and figure out, where you're going. Yes, young St. Louis couple who asked me how to get to Union Station so you could take a train to Wrigley Field, this mea
Getting Around
Sometimes I feel a bit guilty about the bad props I give the Chicago Transit Authority. Trouble is, as experience shows, time and again when you give the CTA enough rope, they just seem to hang themselves. Like they just did again, by installing 3,000 on-board system maps--without proofreading them
Getting Around
Though I don't drive, my boyfriend and workmates do. Tagging along through their experiences with Chicago's two car-sharing services, the for-profit Zipcar and nonprofit I-GO, it was easy to figure out which company offered the better customer-service experience. Hint: in the private sector, the cus
Getting Around
Four weeks ago, CTA communications staff told me the agency would adopt a suggestion of mine to make it easier for riders to find weekend service diversion information. I celebrated that decision on this blog. Trouble is, a month later CTA hasn't bothered to actually make the change.
Getting Around
Recently, I suggested a way for the CTA to improve the way it tells riders about weekend service diversions on its website. And to my surprise, the agency agreed with me.
Getting Around
Perhaps we can be a public-transit region now. Yesterday, the Chicago Tribune decried the sorry state of repair of Metra's Roosevelt Road station, and laid blame at the feet of anti-Chicago Metra Chairman Jeffrey Ladd. Today he says he's resigning.
Getting Around
Ever wonder why the Metra station at Roosevelt Road looks like a big steamy pile of lactose-intolerant toothpaste poop while the rest of the Museum Campus area and the South Loop in general zoom along in their tony upswing? Three words: chairman Jeffrey Ladd.