The bigger problem is that since day one, the feeds have lagged quite a bit. Don't sit at your desk watching the little busses on the map moving around, hoping to dash out when the bus is a several blocks away. Chances are the bus will be past you already.

I don't use the visual map

By Saul on Thu, 10/28/2010 - 12:10pm.

I don't use the visual map but instead the numeric countdowns till the bus is predicted to arrive. And I always subtract around two minutes, since I'd rather wait an extra two minutes than just miss the bus. Of course the predictions become more accurate the closer the bus gets to the stop. It has worked quite well for me waiting at home till the bus is nearby.

yeah, Nextbus's predictions seem pretty decent

By Brett on Thu, 10/28/2010 - 12:27pm.

I suspect they use some sort of correction. But the maps are only vaguely useful.

I once suspected, based off watching the bus data for one particular route, that the busses were losing connection with the MBTA system at certain spots.

Because of capacity

By anon on Thu, 10/28/2010 - 1:12pm.

Because of capacity constraints in the MBTA radio system, the buses only send their location information back to the central system every minute or so, its not a continuous flow of the GPS data from the bus. I think that there are manual methods for either a bus driver or dispatcher to increase the information rate on an individual bus, but it would slow down the entire system if every bus was sending location data constantly. There may also be a further lag from the feed of the raw data going from the MBTA dispatch/radio system to Nextbus, which then applies their algorithms to come up with the predictions. I think Nextbus accounts for all this in the predictions, but perhaps not in the visual map displays.

Minute by minute updates

By JohnAKeith on Thu, 10/28/2010 - 11:06am.

Dear Brett, and what are you having for lunch?

The T is so broken that you

By anon on Thu, 10/28/2010 - 3:31pm.

The T is so broken that you have to know and reason about minutiae to know whether it's going to make you late for work or your appointment again unless you take drastic action.

Is crappy boston traffic

By chicken on Thu, 10/28/2010 - 4:45pm.

Is crappy boston traffic really their fault?

When they don't have enough buses in service

By roadman on Thu, 10/28/2010 - 5:00pm.

to account for regular and recurring traffic conditions in maintaining adequate schedules, yes.

And, as useful as "real time" bus information can be, it doesn't solve that basic problem - not implementing adequate resources to actually move passengers in a timely manner on a reliable basis. This is not only a problem on the bus routes, but with the streetcar and subway lines as well.

Mid-morning outages

By Kaz on Thu, 10/28/2010 - 12:56pm.

I suspect this is related to a question I asked the GM on Twitter a few weeks ago. Sometime between 9 AM and 10 AM (time seems to vary a bit), they have a database problem that wipes out the feeds. They're aware of it and working on a fix is what I was told. The length of the outage and the start time seems to vary.

MBTA real-time tracking lost

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