Vent: Tried the new CTA bus tracker app and it lied to me 3 times last week

I stood at the Damen bus stop for 18 minutes waiting for a bus the app said was arriving in 4 minutes, and then two showed up at once, has anyone else had this app be completely useless?

2 comments

2 Comments

julia_burns91mo ago

I mean, the whole "said it was arriving in 4 minutes and then two showed up at once" part really gets me. It's like the app just guesses and then reality does whatever it wants. I've had that same thing happen at Western and it makes you feel kind of dumb for trusting it in the first place. Maybe it's just me but I think the old paper schedules were more honest because they just told you the times and didn't pretend to know exactly where the bus was. Idk, seems like they spent all this money on something that's basically a random number generator at this point.

lee_grant971mo ago

Used to be one of those people who swore by the apps, thought they were the future and all that. But after getting burned one too many times, like you're describing with the two buses showing up at once, yeah, that changed my mind completely. It's wild how an app can be so confident about something and then just be dead wrong, makes you wonder what the point even is. The old paper schedules at least had the decency to say "this is a guess, plan accordingly" instead of pretending to have real-time data that clearly doesn't exist. You're right, it's basically a random number generator dressed up in a fancy interface.