Innovation, Coordination, and Enhancement (ICE) Projects

The scope of the project is to create a new pilot to increase on-board and in-station police and nonpolice personnel. The goal is to enhance the quality of the on-board experience of customers through the additional personnel and increase the overall safety environment through the additional police.

The project is to enhance CTA’s Safety Management System (SMS) implementation by applying technological innovations to its safety risk management process and collaborating with contracted subject matter experts in transit safety performance and risk reduction.

Provide upgrades to CTA applications and/or processes including the following: Hastus: Update of Planning/Scheduling software application used for planning, operations, customer information, and analysis. Learning Management System: The project objective is to implement a cloud based learning management system that provides a unified and comprehensive eLearning platform that allows for training registration, approval by management and tracking, with real time reporting.

This project includes operational improvements as follows: #4 - Selected trips to operate to and from 115th/Cottage Grove; #26 - Expanded hours of service and all trips will now begin and end at 103rd/Stony Island; #34 - More frequent midday and evening service; #71 - More frequent midday service with all trips operating to/from 112th/Torrence improving frequency of service south of 73rd Street; #95 - Routes 95E and 95W have been combined into a single route providing more convenient service for customers traveling along 95th Street; #119 - More frequent midday and evening service; and Green Line - More frequent service from Cottage Grove and 63rd/Ashland during AM and PM rush.

Esri will develop an agency-wide GIS Strategic Plan or System of Engagement (SoE) that will provide CTA with a roadmap for future uses of GIS within agency departments. Esri will conduct detailed interviews with business units to establish their GIS needs and identify data, maps and apps that arenecessary to achieve their goals. The goal of the SoE is to provide a way for all business units to utilize GIS to improve processes, make work more efficient, retrieve and create authoritative data, effectively utilize applications, provide convenient access to relevant spatial data, and share contributions throughout the agency. The recommended technology with be reusable and the applications will be configurable with little or no custom code.

2021 funding will be for radio equipment to be purchased and installed on buses to enhance the existing Cradlepoint system to upgrade to 5G technology for vehicle to infrastructure communication (innovation and enhancement). 2022 funding will be used for TSP implementation along priority corridors as part of the Regional Transit Signal Priority Implementation Program and integration of regional traffic management centers. Funds from the 2022 ICE grant are intended to be used to connect Pace TSP central system to Lake County DOT Traffic Management Center (TMC) to achieve Centralized Transit Signal Priority Systems. Tasks include (but are not limited to) establishing a working group, developing system engineering management plan, systems/software development and integration, related equipment, proof-of-concept deployment, and a system evaluation report.

Professional consulting services for support and development of CTA's Enterprise Application Systems.

New integrated solutions will be deployed to support Metra's Transportation Division's operations. Included in this are enhancements and new functionality for Metra's crew calling systems, new solutions to integrate existing technology footprint, and efforts to perform business process optimization and organizational design optimization.

Upgrades to Switch Machines to incorporate a predictive maintenance approach in addition to the preventive maintenance performed on switches and proactively replace critical signal equipment. Such an upgrade and approach should reduce switch downtime and enhance switch reliability.