Passenger Alerts

[Zol87]

Why does Pace not post any passenger notices about temporary reroutes, detours or delays like the CTA does?

Yesterday there was an accident on Golf Road in between Waukegan and Harms/Central that closed down Golf in that section. My brother was taking the 208 bus home from Oakton Community College and said that the bus was rerouted via Waukegan, Church, Beckwith, Church, Harms/Central. I looked on the website and there was no information posted. I only knew about the reroute thanks to what my brother told me and the fact that Pace WebWatch was showing buses on the map going off route in that section several hours later.

A similar thing is happening with the 290 at Touhy/McCormick because of work on the bridge over the North Channel of the Chicago River. This project has been going on for a while and Pace has posted nothing about it even when the bus had to be rerouted up to Howard Street between McCormick and Kedzie. I asked the bus driver about posting info about reroutes and he shrugged at me and didn't even suggest that he would pass the idea along to his supervisors.

The CTA posts info on the web whenever there is a construction project, accident, police activity or road block that will affect a route and cause it to go off course. Why can't Pace do the same? It would really help.

[Railwaymodeler]

From what I see riding Pace every day, they do post notices about service disruptions and alterations. They have 8-1/2" by 11" papers taped to the first windows on the bus. Something like an accident on the road doesn't give them enough time to print up these notices and stick them in the buses. Right now here at North Division, there are notices about a re-routed 569 Lewis Crosstown route, due to construction, discontinued shuttle routes, and expanded service on the 570 Fox Lake bus.

So far as their website, that is a little different story. I don't think they post information about accidents causing a temporary re-routing, but that might be because Arlington Heights controls that website (I think), and each specific division may not be able to add or edit anything.

This, of course, could be fixed- there could be division specific pages that management at the respective division could add their information to.

[Guest]

Why does Pace not post any passenger notices about temporary reroutes, detours or delays like the CTA does?

Yesterday there was an accident on Golf Road in between Waukegan and Harms/Central that closed down Golf in that section. My brother was taking the 208 bus home from Oakton Community College and said that the bus was rerouted via Waukegan, Church, Beckwith, Church, Harms/Central. I looked on the website and there was no information posted. I only knew about the reroute thanks to what my brother told me and the fact that Pace WebWatch was showing buses on the map going off route in that section several hours later.

A similar thing is happening with the 290 at Touhy/McCormick because of work on the bridge over the North Channel of the Chicago River. This project has been going on for a while and Pace has posted nothing about it even when the bus had to be rerouted up to Howard Street between McCormick and Kedzie. I asked the bus driver about posting info about reroutes and he shrugged at me and didn't even suggest that he would pass the idea along to his supervisors.

The CTA posts info on the web whenever there is a construction project, accident, police activity or road block that will affect a route and cause it to go off course. Why can't Pace do the same? It would really help.

We all know that accident alerts happening suddenly dont get posted as prompt as detours or construction traffic. The information dosent get passed to supervisors at Pace quick enough as CTA. CTA supervisors are better to communicate with, Pace are too far and few.

[Busjack]

To throw a few other nondefinitive considerations into the mix:

• As Railway Modeler indicates, the Passenger Notices on pacebus.com correspond to those posted on the bus windows. Hence, they would relate to planned outages, such as construction of which Pace has been informed (i.e. because Metra posted that a railroad crossing will be out for a week, Pace is also informed and puts up a notice that the bus is detoured around that crossing).
• It also probably has to do with who does the web maintenance for each, and in Pace's case web design doesn't seem to be a priority.
• Somewhat related, CTA's notices are part of the BusTracker system, in that they also pop up on BusTracker. Even though WebWatch now has Google Maps, one could give it a version number of 0.2, as the implantation is spotty (many routes still not available, new routes not added when the routes are, and buses falling off the map).
• One stimulus for the CTA's system was that the brother of CTA Tattler's Kevin started a CTA text alert system about the time BusTracker started, showing the utility of such a system. CTA Tattler also posts CTA Tweets. Apparently CTA was impressed enough by that to follow suit with its own system. Until such time as someone else shows equivalent interest in Pace, I doubt that it has any incentive to implement such a system on its own.
• A service disruption on Metra would be fairly obvious to the control center, and hence posted.

Of course, this is not the official explanation from an insider, which probably is "we didn't think of it."