After the two-hour delay Chicago commuters experienced this morning on the purple, red, and brown lines; I suggest you send an email to: [email protected]
Here’s my letter. Feel free to copy and send it to the CTA. The more voices, the better. Imagine 50 people sending them this letter on the same day. That should really get them to consider doing it.
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Dear employees of the CTA:
I strongly suggest you implement a service where users of the CTA can subscribe to a cell phone txt message service. Whenever there is a problem on the CTA (such as the brown/purple line issues today), people will get a txt message saying that the brown line service is not working beyond Armitage.
This would be so easy to implement.
1) Get a provider that will allow you to send out one txt message to a mass of people.
2) Have a signup box on your website where people can subscribe by entering in their cell phone number
3) When an major CTA delay comes up, send a txt message out to the group.
Here’s a list of SMS wireless companies (SMS is basically another name for text messages on cell phones):
http://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Business_to_Business/
Communications_and_Networking/Telecommunications/Wireless/
GSM__Global_System_for_Mobile_Communications_/SMS__Short_Message_Service_/
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Nice idea.
i am sending the email from my 6 different email accounts! (work, yahoo, excite, hotmail, aol, unlikelymoose)
i suggest you send this to gapersblock.com and chicagoist.com
they have one. i am on it … you get official txt msgs from CTA.
yeah, it does exist, and it uses the network that the people at cta tattler set up a while ago. http://www.ctatattler.com/2005/08/cta_sends_first.html
Thanks for that link, Donna. I checked out the service. Here’s the deal. “cta_alerts” is a group on Upoc Mobile Group. There are 316 people signed up to get alerts. Anyone in this group can send a text message to the entire group. Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Cingular, and Alltel/Boomerang users: Send JOIN CTAALERTS to 8762 to join this group. Send QUIT CTAALERTS to 8762 to leave. Bell Mobility, Sprint, Nextel and others: Premium groups are not available at this time. For more information on this group, go to: http://www.upoc.com/group.jsp?group=ctaalerts I’m not going to join this group, because check out how many text messages have been sent in the past four weeks: 9/1: 1 messages sent 9/2: 3 messages sent 9/3: 2 messages sent 9/4: 0 messages sent 9/5: 1 message sent 9/6: 2 messages sent 9/7: 2 messages sent 9/8: 0 messages sent 9/9: 1 message sent 9/10: 0 messages sent 9/11: 0 messages sent 9/12: 12 messages sent 9/13: 4 messages sent 9/14: 4 messages sent 9/15: 16 messages sent 9/16: 2 messages sent 9/17: 1 message sent 9/18: 1 message sent 9/19: 2 messages sent 9/20: 3 messages sent 9/21: 4 messages sent 9/22: 19 messages sent 9/23: 5 messages sent 9/24: 0 messages sent 9/25: 7 messages sent 9/26: 1 message sent 9/27: 2 messages sent 9/28: 21 messages sent That’s an average of 4.1 text messages a day! With some days getting over 10 texts! Whoa how annoying is that! Please CTA, have an official system, so we don’t have to get like 10 texts a day.
I strongly suggest you implement a service where users of the CTA can subscribe to a cell phone txt message service.
Easy, are you suggesting that I implement the service? Or you are you suggesting that the CTA implement the service? Only the CTA would be able to implement a system that actually works. I couldn’t set one up, because I don’t have the inside knowledge of when trains are delayed and why. The multiple user group (as explained in the comments above) just puts out way too many messages. The CTA needs to implement this system for their inside knowledge of their system. Don’t they have a dispatcher that all the train conductors talk to? Or is the entire system just held together by automated systems and rules?
Thanks for that link, Donna. I checked out the service. Here’s the deal. “cta_alerts” is a group on Upoc Mobile Group. There are 316 people signed up to get alerts. Anyone in this group can send a text message to the entire group.
I’m on the cta_alerts system from cta tattler, and it can be annoying, but it’s definitely worth it for me.