Breaking news when you need it: Toward a better CTA Tweet

Guest post by Dan O'Neil.

In September of last year I launched CTA Tweet along with Harper Reed. When I wrote about the system on the CTA Tattler, I warned that it might be lame. That lameness definitely came to pass, and over the last few weeks I've made some changes that I think make the @ctatweet Twitter account a lot more useful.

First, a quick recap on why @ctatweet was lame:

• No mainline feed of authoritative information. The old CTA Alert system that many of you may remember was great because the CTA itself was the largest contributor of information to that system. This made people trust it and to be quick to provide their own authoritative info
• The @replies to individual train line Twitter accounts (@ctablue, @ctared, and so on) went unmonitored. Good info was tweeted there, but very often didn't make it to the main @ctatweet account, which has the lion's share of followers and where people would expect to see quality info
• The CTA RSS feeds-- which are often pumped into the CTA Tweet feeds-- supply a ton of quality, authoritative info (as I noted when they launched back in December of 2008), but the vast majority of it relates to planned/ scheduled service changes, elevator status messages, and minor shifts in bus stop locations. Simple answers to important questions get lost in the flood

The thing we really need are answers to questions like, "should I get on the bus or the train to go home?" and "am I going to be late for work if I go down these stairs to the subway?", and "is everything on my train line completely muffed up right now?"

So I think I have the fix, and with some help from you and the CTA, I think it can be even better.

The thing that really works is a central human editor collecting information from well-placed human sources and republishing key bits so that people can make decisions. I have been actively managing the @ctatweet stream for a few weeks, giving it renewed attention. I've covered the Pink Line outage (standing water), Northbound Lake Shore Drive traffic issues forcing the reroute of buses, recent Red Line issues, and even dead deer on the Yellow Line track.

I get this information from a cobbling of sources: the CTA RSS feeds, the RTA Transit Alerts from goroo.com, a Yahoo! Pipe I made that removes the planned reroutes and elevator status messages out of the CTA feeds, and the #CTA hashtag on Twitter, and @replies to ctatweet.

Seems like a lot of gymnastics, I know-- that's why I was hesitant to do it when I first launched CTA Tweet. What I've found, though, is that there are just a couple incidents a week that are worth tweeting about, but they tend to be pretty high impact incidents. By mentally parsing the messages in the normal course of a day, it's easy to retweet what matters and let the rest slide by in the millions of other ancillary Internet beeps I consume.

So keep tweeting @replies for key info about current service conditions on the Chicago Transit Authority. If it's really good stuff that needs, the best thing to do is send an email to info at ctatweet dot com. I've also contacted the CTA to see if they could add this email address to important status messages -- more on that later.