At 8:30 this morning, Dave Vittorini tweeted to MBTA General Manager Richard Davey about conditions on the Hyde Park Avenue bus:
operator 70135 on the 32 bus NEVER has the ac on. It's sooo hot. I feel like I need another shower when I get to work.
Six minutes later, Davey replied:
we'll take care of that.
Valerie Rose Taylor, an associate professor at Berklee, is singing the praises of an orchestra's worth of MBTA workers who reunited her with the violin her parents gave her more than four decades ago after she left it on a 71 bus out of Watertown Square.
Because, as Stephanie reports, it just ran out of fuel. How does that happen?
Saul Blumenthal reports NextBus, the service the T is using to provide arrival data, just dramatically expanded the number of routes with information available to riders.
Emily Bradford snapped this photo of an MBTA bus today - on the New York State Thruway in upstate New York.
Ben Timmins reports the trackless trolley was out between Harvard and Watertown squares because a truck managed to rip out about 150 feet of catenary wire. The T reports the wire has been repaired and the electric buses are starting to roll again.
The MBTA holds a meeting on Wednesday to discuss plans to start running larger hybrid buses on the 28 line between Mattapan Square and Ruggles. The session on the articulated buses starts at 6 p.m. at the Mattapan BPL branch.
The T says the larger buses can hold more people and will pollute less. But new stops for the longer buses could mean elimination of dozens of parking spaces along the route, which has some merchants concerned, the Herald reports.
TKOG reports:
... Blondie exhaled a double-lung of disgust and, as she stood, picked up her drenched umbrella from the ground of the bus and put it on my seat, where it lay dripping for thirty seconds while she arranged her bag. "Ooooh, I'm so sorry," she smirked, straight out of Gossip Girl, "Now the seat's all wet! You probably don't want to sit there!
At a developer's conference this evening, the MBTA will announce plans to give access to real-time bus location data on all its bus lines by the end of the summer.
In the meantime, the T is immediately releasing data on 12 bus lines, in addition to the five already covered by its "Where's the Bus" system. The new routes: 1, 4, 15, 22, 23, 28, 32, 57, 66, 71, 73, and 77. They join the 39, 111, 114, 116, and 117 routes.
The Globe reports 14 people were injured in a crash this evening between an MBTA bus and a minivan at Gallivan Boulevard and Morton Street. The one saving grace: There's a fire station right there.
That makes 13 inspectors fired and six disciplined for pretending to inspect buses, Channel 5 reports.
Channel 4 reports a driver on the 78 bus between Arlington and Harvard Square got a quick 10-day suspension after an alert motorist snapped a photo of him reading the paper while driving the bus this morning - and then e-mailed the portrait to the T (and Channel 4, natch).
A Brookline man is charged with lifting a woman's skirt and groping her on a 39 bus on South Huntington Avenue around 11:30 a.m. today.
Timothy Sheehan, 49, was arrested near the Brookline Village Green Line stop after getting off the bus near Heath Street, according to an MBTA Transit Police report.
The MBTA today rolled out its first hybrid bus, which will run along route 39 with three other of the $900,000, federally stimulated buses. Another four of the diesel/electric buses will be put into service along route 28 and the Washington Street Silver Line. None, presumably, use Prius floor mats.
The MBTA confirms a bicyclist died after a collision late this afternoon near the intersection of Huntington and South Huntington avenues. MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo said "an active investigation" is underway by MBTA and Boston police.
A pilot project to let private developers hook into real-time data from just five bus lines will be expanded to every route in the MBTA system, new General Manager Richard Davey said at a software developer's conference this evening, Samantha Hammar tweets.
To try to help somebody out, I wanted to see which bus lines go from Forest Hills to the Dedham Mall and when (yeah, I know, the 34 and 34E go there, but when?). So on the handy little form right on the MBTA home page, I typed in "forest hills" as my starting point and "dedham mall" as my destination, and got back this:
Really, MBTA Trip Planner? Come on.
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