Seven Red

One of the great things about where we live is the transportation infrastructure. Today we will walk about a block to the corner, jump on a public bus, then take the CTA to O’Hare, then take a plane to Albany. Mass transit from door-to-door. OK, not really, since we’ll take a car out to she‘s Mom’s place once we get to Albany, but still. babygirl has been promised train ride AND plane ride, so she’s excited. “First we gotta get way way way up in the sky,” she says.

One very cool feature of the CTA: the CTA bus tracker, a step up from the old bus timetable we used to gripe about in NYC. This engine allows you to better estimate when to go to the bus stop by providing a GPS-based estimated time of arrival for buses that are currently en route. It also maps them on to a Google Map so you can see precisely where they are. It is, of course, the same technology that’s been in cars through the Garman and in planes for quite some time: the trip tracker stuff. But it’s genius to put it in a bus, since the worst thing about mass transit is the waiting, and the lack of information associated with waiting. This technology at least gives you an information stream that makes waiting more predictable. Thumbs up to the CTA.

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