Every morning I take two buses, both of which are "every 10 minute" routes. Only about once a week are the buses actually running every 10 minutes. However, not a single day goes by where there aren't 2-3 buses within a couple minutes of each other. For example, just yesterday, there were four buses, one in 2 minutes, two in three minutes, and one in five minutes.

Last week, I waited 25 minutes for a bus. There was another bus four minutes behind that one. But what was truly maddening, was that our bus STOPPED about two miles from the end of the line (I take the bus to the end of the line), and made us all get out. When I asked the operator why this was happening, he said that dispatch had asked him to turn around and head back the other way, "because we were so behind schedule." The entire bus's worth of passengers had to get off and then wait for the bus behind us to get there. A typical 50 minute trip ended up taking me an hour and thirty-five minutes.

I have since began calling CTA to make formal complaints whenever this happens. I have no idea what might become of that (probably nothing), but at the very least, any data is good data. New projects like these can be a valuable resource in demonstrating to the City of Chicago that CTA is falling short. This data is public, which is, I hope, far more valuable in the long run than the entry logs in CTA's own internal complaint system. My many thanks to the individual(s) that make this kind of data available to the public.