Transit Partnership Releases Site, Wants us to Telecommute

By Timmy Watson in News on Dec 17, 2006 9:59PM

Drive Less. Live More. The new slogan and website from the Regional Transportation Authority is mostly aimed at providing details and tools for using public transportation. The tools are not necessarily new, some have been around for year, but it is great that the RTA has finally put all of these together in a central site.

The site contains commuter calculators, which estimated for us that if we drove to work we would be spending $312/month and $3,750/year. They also provide 'Did you know?' facts that are pretty astounding, according to RTA "Every year public transit operations in Chicago saves our community $1.577 billion due to Congestion Cost Savings. Each peak traveler in Chicago saves 22 hours per year because of public transit." They also indicate that telecommuting is a very viable option for alleviating some of the state's extremely high traffic congestion.

Another benefit of the site is a central area of travel updates. This section of the site provides updates for CTA, Pace, Metra, traffic, and a new function, the CTA bustracker. The CTA bustracker is a new tool (currently only used on the #20 Madison bus) that allows you to see real time data on where the bus is.