Results tagged “nexttrain”

In a revolutionary development for the MBTA, the organization has decided that it might be nice to tell commuters when trains are arriving. As we all know, some stations already have announcements like "The next Red Line train to Alewife is now approaching," but those announcements usually occur at about the time you can either see or feel the train on its way. It would be nice to know whether your wait will be 5 minutes or 25, and some other cities, like DC and Paris, already have countdown-type systems that work pretty well. There's a "Next Train" countdown feature being planned for commuter rail, and the MBTA will tackle bus alerts after that. Installing individual countdown or update signs at every bus station would be extremely expensive, so the focus is on finding ways to provide phone or PDA alerts. Riders will be able to text their bus route number to the MBTA and get a response indicating scheduled arrival times. We think it'd be nice if we could just, y'know, call an MBTA hotline and get a list of when trains are coming, but maybe that's too high tech.