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rsc...or, When Useful Technology Makes the Job Harder.
We had tickets to yesterday afternoon's Red Sox game (a rare daytime weekday game), and because of the dubious weather, we decided to scrap our plans to take the commuter rail from Gloucester, and instead drove to West St. so we could monitor the likelihood of the game actually starting on time -- which, we learned, it was about to do, so we did our usual thing of taking the #47 bus from Central Square to the stop on Park Drive immediately above the Fenway Green Line station. The bus was a little late, and so were we, but no great harm done.
The game was over reasonably quickly for a Red Sox game (2 hours, 46 minutes), and in the past we would have returned home vie the Green Line from Kenmore, and the Red Line, the #47 being notoriously unreliable; but the MBTA has recently made real-time bus locations available online, and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jwg has a couple of applications on his Droid to access this information, and it suggested that there would be an outbound #47 bus arriving at the Fenway stop about 5 minutes after we were likely to get there.
Except... it didn't. And as John continued monitoring the progress of various purported #47 buses, they would get closer and then vanish. Of course, this was rush hour, and the bus passes through the Longwood medical area right before it heads up Park Drive, but still, we waited an inordinately long time, while it became increasingly apparent that the bus-location information the MBTA was giving out was largely fictitious.
Eventually, a #47 did appear, and we boarded it. its heat was going full blast -- yes, it was chilly for August, but "chilly for August" means mid-60s F, and everyone was dressed for such conditions; the temperature in the bus was at least 80. Furthermore, by this time traffic was so seriously backed up from the BU Bridge and whatever else that it took us three lights just to get across Beacon St., and things were clearly going to get worse before they got better. So, rather than spend what seemed likely to be close to an hour on an overheated bus, we got off, walked the long block west to St. Mary's Street, and took the Green Line and the Red Line. (Of course, the first Green Line train to come along was running as an express, probably to pick up the remnants of the game traffic, and passed us by.) We arrived at Central Square on the stroke of 6:00, approximately an hour later than we would most likely have arrived if we had just gone directly to Kenmore from the game. We got to Gloucester a little after 7:00, just as the evening game (makeup from Tuesday) was starting.
We had tickets to yesterday afternoon's Red Sox game (a rare daytime weekday game), and because of the dubious weather, we decided to scrap our plans to take the commuter rail from Gloucester, and instead drove to West St. so we could monitor the likelihood of the game actually starting on time -- which, we learned, it was about to do, so we did our usual thing of taking the #47 bus from Central Square to the stop on Park Drive immediately above the Fenway Green Line station. The bus was a little late, and so were we, but no great harm done.
The game was over reasonably quickly for a Red Sox game (2 hours, 46 minutes), and in the past we would have returned home vie the Green Line from Kenmore, and the Red Line, the #47 being notoriously unreliable; but the MBTA has recently made real-time bus locations available online, and
jwg has a couple of applications on his Droid to access this information, and it suggested that there would be an outbound #47 bus arriving at the Fenway stop about 5 minutes after we were likely to get there.Except... it didn't. And as John continued monitoring the progress of various purported #47 buses, they would get closer and then vanish. Of course, this was rush hour, and the bus passes through the Longwood medical area right before it heads up Park Drive, but still, we waited an inordinately long time, while it became increasingly apparent that the bus-location information the MBTA was giving out was largely fictitious.
Eventually, a #47 did appear, and we boarded it. its heat was going full blast -- yes, it was chilly for August, but "chilly for August" means mid-60s F, and everyone was dressed for such conditions; the temperature in the bus was at least 80. Furthermore, by this time traffic was so seriously backed up from the BU Bridge and whatever else that it took us three lights just to get across Beacon St., and things were clearly going to get worse before they got better. So, rather than spend what seemed likely to be close to an hour on an overheated bus, we got off, walked the long block west to St. Mary's Street, and took the Green Line and the Red Line. (Of course, the first Green Line train to come along was running as an express, probably to pick up the remnants of the game traffic, and passed us by.) We arrived at Central Square on the stroke of 6:00, approximately an hour later than we would most likely have arrived if we had just gone directly to Kenmore from the game. We got to Gloucester a little after 7:00, just as the evening game (makeup from Tuesday) was starting.
