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I Know!
This free service gets a whole bunch of stuff wrong!
When is free not free?
Part of your fare goes to maintaining their website. It's not free in the same way that you expect traffic lights to work correctly but I don't ever remember paying a "traffic light tax" at the last intersection I crossed.
The MBTA and technology have never been great friends. It took them a long time to come out with a citizens-connect style app for the MBTA, they have RFID cards that "expire", other cities figured out how to track mixed subway/street-car lines like the Green Line long ago, their website searchability is woefully bad...
This is just another example of where they made a decent feature, but haven't maintained it for years.
I'm sorry
I was speaking of Google.
My apologies.
As a sprite teen, during the early middle of the second Reagan Administration, I got to go to London for a few days, and noticed all these electronic signs in the Underground saying when the next train was coming for which destination. Since I took the T nearly every day I thought well those surely would be coming to the my fair city soon.
I am so pleased that now that my son is a young teen that he can now join in the elation that I felt 28 years ago with a sign telling him the next Braintree train is only 58 minutes away.
The MBTA - Getting you to your 21st century economy job with the Kenny Loggins somewhere on the soundtrack dated technology.
Google is hardly free, they
Google is hardly free, they just obscure how we pay.
Ah, there is some confusion then
The complaints that were being made were for the items that MBTA staff have overlaid onto the Google maps interface via an API that Google maps provides.
The content being complained about has nothing to do with Google content and everything to do with the incorrect programming of the MBTA (most of the "Points" are incorrect kludges the MBTA used to make the route contour the road where they didn't have stops). Or just flat out out of date info like the 6 bus and Terminal D being left in.
Google's own transit layer
Google's own transit layer never has as many mistakes as this.
Difficulties with the map of the Massachusetts Highway System...
What are the difficulties with the map of the Massachusetts Highway System?... particularly the Zakim Bridge and Leverett Connector at
https://www.massdot.state.ma.us/Portals/17/docs/StateMap2012.pdf
Looks good to me
The big map gives the exit numbers. The Boston insert even shows the detail of Leverett Circle.
So, tell us Don, what is the problem with the map?
The MBTA trip planner was
The MBTA trip planner was written in house, years before Google transit existed, and before there were commercial software packages for creating these sorts of maps automatically from the internal mapping and scheduling software. This was a cool early embrace of technology at the time, but unfortunately the T has not had the resources to maintain and develop the software they wrote, so bugs and errors have been piling up. Switching to one of the existing software packages is possible, but also costs money. Just scrapping the whole thing and pointing at Google has been discussed, but is a scary step. If Google has something horribly wrong, you really have no way of doing anything about it immediately no matter what.
I hope Miles also forwarded these useful discoveries of errors to the T, so they can either try to fix them, or at least be aware of just how many errors are building up in the system and use that to try to justify spending resources on the problem.
Trade Hours for Fares
Things like this make me wish the MBTA would be open to posting a list of tech problems and offering free fares in exchange for fixing them. In the case of this map, there are lots of people in Boston who do this style of development daily, sometimes even as students working out of their dorm rooms. If the MBTA offered a free "Unlimited 12 Month Pass" in exchange for getting google maps working correct it might be worth someone's time to fix the problem. Since the MBTA isn't "paying" them it should bypass most of the procurement policies. If the person screws up the worst that happens is T keeps using the current system and nothing is lost.
In graduate school
I did a pretty deep assessment of the MBTA website from a design and usability perspective. Whole thing is a mess.
Take everything with a grain of salt on MBTA.com
These errors are ages old, and neither filling out the online form to complain, nor tweeting @MBTA results in change. The interactive street maps are all buggy, and the individual station information pages frequently have errors. Even the full system map (PDF) has errors or old routes sometimes.
Not to mention, the "current projects" page which has projects from TEN YEARS AGO listed as "under construction."