The days of watching a “ghost bus” pass you by may soon be over. The CTA is working hard to address these issues.
Ghost bus incidents occur when a bus passes by designated bus stops on a given route without explanation, leaving those passengers waiting, confused. For years passengers have complained and expressed frustration about spending extra time waiting for another bus to arrive after a ghost bus has passed.
By implementing new measures, the CTA aims to ensure that passengers have a reliable service and do not have to deal with ghost buses.
The Chicago Transit Authority, or CTA, is now providing data on buses that are canceled each day, so they won’t show up as scheduled in tracking apps.
The CTA has been sharing such data since May 1.
The news comes as CTA officials seek to restore confidence and ridership on its transit system in post pandemic Chicago. The agency has struggled to draw back riders to buses and trains since the pandemic. According to CTA data, average weekday ridership is currently around 69 percent.
Many residents on the South and West Sides rely on CTA buses to travel to work and other destinations. For years the CTA shared real-time bus tracking information publicly. Transit-focused applications use such data to inform riders of a bus approaching their stop. Until recently, riders did not know whether a bus that showed up on a tracker as “scheduled” was actually coming.
Ghost buses were a common occurrence during the coronavirus pandemic, when the CTA experienced a shortage of operators and was operating fewer buses and trains than were scheduled.
CTA at the time said that ghost buses were rampant because it had no technical way to remove the scheduled buses that were never expected to run, due to short staffing. CTA said those unstaffed buses could only be removed twice a year, when the agency was allowed by its union contracts to update its bus timetables.
CTA said its staffing problem has been mostly resolved, and it has corrected most of the canceled bus problems that appear on bus trackers. The agency has more bus operators than it did before the pandemic, and the CTA has nearly as many train operators as before, according to the agency’s public data dashboard.
CTA officials said the Ventra app, Google Maps and Apple Maps will soon show canceled buses as well.
According to its website, the CTA fleet has 1,966 buses that operate 127 routes and 1,516 route miles. Buses make about 18,503 trips a day and serve 10,588 bus stops.
The CTA operates the nation’s second largest public transportation system. On an average weekday, 953,787 rides are taken on CTA. The CTA is a regional transit system serving 35 suburbs, in addition to the City of Chicago, and it provides 87 percent of the public transit trips in the six-county Chicago metropolitan area, either with direct service or connecting service to Metra and Pace.
According to the CTA dashboard, the agency in June operated 98.8 percent of its scheduled buses and 88 percent of scheduled trains.
Interim CTA President Nora Leerhsen took the helm February 1 from retiring Dorval Carter Jr., as he faced criticism of being unresponsive to complaints about safety and reliability during the pandemic.
Leershen said the CTA has deployed supervisors in the field to monitor service delivery, resulting in “90 percent reliability” and “very significant drops in complaints” from riders.