96 Bus Route (inbound)

[foxgloved.livejournal.com]

Does anyone know why the inbound 96 bus has been traveling a shortened route lately? I used to be able to take it all the way to Harvard in the morning, but now it seems to stop at Davis. I can't see anything on the MBTA website explaining the change. Is this a shortened route due to weather? Has it been changed permanently? Or is there something else going on - like all the buses are delayed, so I'm catching a different bus than I normally would at that time?

(Sorry if this is obvious - I only take the bus when the weather is awful, so I'm not super familiar with it.)

Comments

[dmaze]

If you point your phone's Web browser at nextbus.com, and let your phone tell the site where it physically is, it will find the nearest bus stops to your location and match it up with real-time GPS bus data. I've found it incredibly helpful in the past to get to Arlington; I imagine if you have an actual bus commute it's near indispensable.

(The last time I looked there were a half-dozen iOS "NextBus" apps, which were all third-party apps that wrapped the Web site in an ad-serving container. Just use the Web site directly.)

[rmd.livejournal.com]

Has the MBTA fixed their data feed so that clients like nextbus can better parse routes like this and the 89 where the route can vary but the route number is the same? I haven't taken the 89 in a while, but in the past the various bus tracking clients couldn't necessarily parse the Clarendon Hill vs Davis Square trips. (Speaking of which, it's a shame the Davis Square versions of the 89 don't just go up Holland to hit Clarendon Hill that way.)

[leafshimmer.livejournal.com]

Thanks. My phone does have some kind of web thing but since I have no data plan, I have never used. Recently a helpful friend told me that I can use the web browser when I'm in a wi fi area even without the data plan. However, I do not think this would help with using it when waiting at my bus stop on George street.

Archaic, isn't it? cheers.

[aliothsan.livejournal.com]

Actually, you can also query NextBus via phone or text. If you enter a query of interest in a desktop browser (example (http://www.nextbus.com/#!/mbta/89/89_1_var0/2696/2714)), then on the right side bar there are instructions for submitting basically the same query. SMS query seems to work fine; I haven't tried regular-phone query.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_meej_/]

My in-laws have their regular routes and stops programmed into their non-smart phones as phone-query calls to NextBus, complete with the little pauses to pick a route and a stop number. They just speed-dial the appropriate one and get the update.

So, super-convenient, if you take the time to set it up. (Their results are sometimes as fast as me pulling out the smartphone, unlocking, opening the nextbus app, having it find my location...)

[leafshimmer.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the "example" link! I hadn't realized that "NextBus" is its own website; I kept thinking it was a protocol on the MBTA's own site.

This is one of those crucial steps that somehow got omitted when folks spoke to me about this in the past.

[jesseh.livejournal.com]

You can also look at the website from home/work/other place with a computer to figure out when to leave for the bus stop. It's not perfect, but better than relying on the schedule....