There’s no longer any real need to resort to fancy smartphone apps or psychic devination, when it comes to catching the TTC here in Toronto, because beleaguered transit riders now have CatchTTC.com as an easy, one-stop location for their web browsers that will put the basic info at their fingertips. So what’s the catch?
There really isn’t one. This site is just a bare-bones scheduling service that let’s you pick favourite stops from all the TTC routes, and then just takes your current time to tell you when the next two arrivals will be. No dowloads, and no more searching through the maze of the TTC’s main website for route schedules.
Ad-Driven Transit Reforms?
If anything the TTC would be smart to spend a tiny fraction of its enormous budget (currently sucked up by management and personal) to just buy into this website now…While it’s still in it’s cheap infancy phase.
ie. Not showing much revenue from any ads that it will sure get clicks on as the layout and features improve themselves.
From there, this service could be easily improved upon by showing service disruptions and perhaps even optimized to offer tweetbacks of next arrivals to Twitter accounts that tweet a desire for info on their favourite #TTCstop…
In fact, if the TTC could figure out how to integrate that sort of service with forms of advertising that actually connected with riders during all of that blank-faced transit time, they could offer free Wi-Fi and have a real winner on their hands…and a much less disgrunteled ridership to boot!