09/25/2025

RTA Travel Information Action Plan

Best Practice

The RTA Travel Information Action Plan is a critically important roadmap that will help the RTA, CTA, Metra, and Pace to better coordinate how and where they share information regarding transit service, arrivals, real-time information, and other aspects of service that customers require to complete their trip. The unofficial working title of this plan was “Why is Bus Tracker so unreliable and how can we fix it?” Key challenges about this was how each agency reports information using the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) which governs what information makes its way onto real-time arrival displays, audio announcements, websites and smartphone apps. With increasing frustration among the traveling public, RTA embarked on an inventory-drive and user experience-supported plan to improve how this information is delivered through technological and interagency coordination means. Key successes to this plan are improved standardization of how each agency shares its GTFS with others and third-party providers (e.g., Google, Transit App), and the development of recommendations to eliminate ghost buses, a key complaint among steering committee participants, stakeholders, and transit professionals.

Click here to view the RTA website.

Click here to view the plan.

Submitted by: HNTB Corporation

Funding agency: RTA

Supporting organizations: Chicago Transit Authority, Metra, Pace Bus, RTA