It is fairly well documented that communicating to transit riders how long they need to wait for the next train helps them feel like they’re actually waiting less. The problem, it would seem, is the unknown.

This is akin to the pre-Uber days when you’d call for a taxi and then have no idea when it would actually show up. That used to feel like forever.

But what about if you communicate a schedule to riders and then it turns out to be a total lie? Well this is probably worse, because eventually, people will catch on to this. Also, you’ve just maximized the unknown.

Here is an interesting example of community activism. In 2021, Fabio Göttlicher — a software engineer in Chicago — started noticing that service levels on Chicago’s Transit Authority (CTA) seemed to be declining.

So he did this:

I wrote a program that runs 24 hours a day that keeps tracking the live trains as they come into stations.

And then he discovered this:

What I found, when I first started in December 2021, was that the CTA was running only about 55 to 60 percent of the trains their schedule said they should be running. I started publishing the data in local Facebook groups for transit enthusiasts, on Reddit and other social media. That’s how Commuters Take Action started.

It’s hard to think of a more frustrating scenario for transit riders.