Miles on the MBTA

September 17, 2017 11:22 AM

My name is Miles (hence the name of the blog), and I'm obsessed with the MBTA. One man's four and a half year epic quest to ride and review every single bus route serviced by Boston's MBTA.
posted by AndrewStephens (23 comments total)

Everybody needs a hobby. And you might meet someone like Marilyn Monroe at the bus stop. (Also, it's another quest that makes more sense than eating at every Cracker Barrel in the U.S.)
posted by LeLiLo at 11:40 AM on September 17, 2017 [2 favorites]

He's the man who never returned!
posted by TedW at 11:44 AM on September 17, 2017 [14 favorites]

I've taken the 77 more times than I can count, but I had never taken it past North Cambridge before. I finally got the chance after taking the 79. The 77 is a big, bunching behemoth,

So odds are that I've shared the bus with him at some point in the last mumble years. I need a hobby.
posted by sammyo at 12:00 PM on September 17, 2017 [2 favorites]

Good ol' 77.
posted by praemunire at 12:31 PM on September 17, 2017 [2 favorites]

I've taken Route 66 between Harvard Square and Coolidge Corner. I did not get my kicks as the song promised I would.
posted by AndrewStephens at 1:13 PM on September 17, 2017 [6 favorites]

I believe I rode the 55 from Queensberry to downtown and back every day, but this was before our young Miles was born.

Will the next comment be about the 44?
posted by pracowity at 1:19 PM on September 17, 2017 [2 favorites]

Rolling Rock - From the glass lined tanks of Old Latrobe, we tender this premium beer for your enjoyment as a tribute to your good taste. It comes from the mountain springs to you.
posted by chavenet at 2:48 PM on September 17, 2017 [4 favorites]

Related to this story, which is the darker side of a boy with an obsession with transit.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 2:52 PM on September 17, 2017 [2 favorites]

I'll admit that I was most surprised when I got to the word "girlfriend". So much for my stereotypes.
posted by clawsoon at 3:32 PM on September 17, 2017 [1 favorite]

I rode the 1 so many times in college that I can't remember another bus route. It's the only one that exists for me.
posted by drewbage1847 at 5:16 PM on September 17, 2017

This is great. I live in Boston so I'm interested to read as much of it as I can. I remember when I first moved up here, riding all the way north from the Deep South, and I was so excited to see an MBTA bus in Woburn - it meant I was almost there.

My trouble is that I don't trust buses - not in any city, honestly. Trains, now, I like them. You know where you are, with trains, or rather, you know where they are. But the bus might get held up in traffic or, for abstruse and unknowable reasons, just not show the hell up. I've been left flat by a Revere bus in the dead of winter. Miles notes this kind of thing himself. I don't take a bus if I can't do it with a 30-minute cushion before the time I am supposed to show up to a given place. If I can walk from a train station, I'll at least know that I'm going somewhere.
posted by Countess Elena at 5:21 PM on September 17, 2017 [1 favorite]

This is a good place to tell my story of the first time I rode the subway.

It was 1988. I had been accepted into the B.U. Graduate Tax program, and I flew out to find a place to live for the one-year program. I had a hotel in Kenmore Square (very convenient to the campus, as I found out) and found it easy enough to walk to the administration building, register, etc., and get a list of available apartments nearby.

I knew I would have to ride the subway for that. For all of my semi-adult life, I had driven everywhere; I was born and brought up in Oklahoma City, a city on a grid built around the automobile. I had also been acclimated to fear and mistrust the subway - the Warriors always seemed to only make it to another graffiti-festooned train with yet another batch of costumed hoodlums, and (as mentioned above) Charlie never made it home.

My first day in Boston, I went to the Kenmore station and bought a single token. I got on the green line, and rode one stop, to the Hynes Convention Center stop (which I'm pretty sure was named Auditorium at the time), got off the train, went above ground, and looked around. I found I was still in Boston, and I could see where I had come from (kind of) and knew that the system worked. I was very proud of myself, but I still walked back to my hotel in Kenmore Square before I invested any more to travel any further that day.

Twenty-nine years later, I am still here.
posted by yhbc at 5:24 PM on September 17, 2017 [11 favorites]

Everyone needs a hobby, but this is just masochistic. There's actually a deeply interesting history to the way the T subway (the oldest in the nation) was cobbled together out of competing private train lines to make one problematic public one. Different standards for turn radii and train lengths still bedevil the system during tough winters.

The bus routes just suck ass for no good or interesting reason.
posted by es_de_bah at 6:06 PM on September 17, 2017 [2 favorites]

On a personal note, I considered the buses pretty much unridable until the smartphone bus tracking apps came around. The posted schedules might as well have been wild guesses. I don't think bus drivers were allowed to see them. The various apps made it much more reasonable. That is until I started taking the 57 to work and back. Buses would just randomly appear and disappear on the app with no rhyme or reason. So many nights waiting in the freezing cold on buses that would vanish just before getting to my stop.
posted by es_de_bah at 6:15 PM on September 17, 2017 [3 favorites]

Miles is amazing. He was part of the (recently broken) record for riding all the T's lines (three years ago - when he was just 13). And if you scroll down his blog, you'll notice a lot of recent reviews of bus routes run by the PVTA out in western Mass. - he rode them while attending some summer program (in transportation, of course) at UMass Amherst.
posted by adamg at 7:34 PM on September 17, 2017 [1 favorite]

The bus routes just suck ass for no good or interesting reason.

One of the interesting, sometimes frustrating things about T bus routes is how many of them basically follow the same path as streetcar lines from the 1800s and early 1900s - most of which the MTA and the MBTA disassembled. My favorite is the 34E, which runs from Forest Hills all the way out to Walpole, a route that today seems to make little sense, yet it follows the route of an older trolley line, so at some point, somebody saw a need for a line like that.

If you take the VA Hospital version of the 35 out of Forest Hills, you can even still see evidence of the old trolley line at the end, where there's an oddly oval parking lot - which is where the trolleys used to turn around. The closed (but soon to be re-opened) restaurant there used to be a trolley dispatch center. If you look down just outside the restaurant entrance, you can even see part of the old tracks poking through the asphalt - across from an odd, raised concrete rectangle that used to be the boarding spot for people heading to Forest Hills (even the giant billboard that dominates the restaurant stems from those days - it's owned by the MBTA, which inherited the spot it's on from the MTA and, before that, the Boston Elevated Railway).
posted by adamg at 7:51 PM on September 17, 2017 [8 favorites]

His review of the 96 bus, which I take to/from work everyday, is pretty spot on, except for him somehow not picking a day with regular ridership.

There were a few businesses at Powderhouse Square, otherwise known as The Rotary Of Infinite Slowness Because It Has Traffic Lights.

Powederhouse Square is an example of Why We Can't Have Nice Things.

Turning onto Boston Ave, we went by more university buildings, including one that was under construction.

Despite the fact that his review was posted in 2015, this is still true. It will always be true.

.There were some restaurants marketed toward students,

You can tell this because they are all pizza places.
posted by DiscourseMarker at 8:15 PM on September 17, 2017 [5 favorites]

Boston still runs trolleybuses so they're all right in my book.

(I had this thought while looking at some of his pictures and seeing trolleybus wire in some of them. Sure enough, MBTA still runs four trolley routes. Good on them.)
posted by fireoyster at 2:15 AM on September 18, 2017

Medford Square and Davis Square are interesting, but there isn't much of note in between. Well, Tufts, I suppose.

Dollars to Dunkin' Donuts he goes to "college in Boston".

Go Jumbos!
posted by Rock Steady at 6:04 AM on September 18, 2017

Also, if the first image on his review of the 90 isn't the town flag of Medford, it really should be.
posted by Rock Steady at 6:11 AM on September 18, 2017

Dollars to Dunkin' Donuts he goes to "college in Boston".

Actually, he's still in high school, so he goes to high school in Boston (or one of the suburbs).
posted by adamg at 8:16 AM on September 18, 2017

I say I went to college in Boston even though I went to MIT mostly because the second I say I went to MIT I get the reaction of "oh you must be some sort of genius". It colors everything else in a not so pleasant way.
posted by drewbage1847 at 8:39 AM on September 18, 2017

But if you say you "went to college in Boston" people think you went to Harvard. And you don't want people thinking that. (By "you" I mean "I".)
posted by madcaptenor at 9:01 AM on September 18, 2017