How a Bus Route Falls Apart (2025)
Summary
The post analyzes the MBTA’s Route 77 performance using Winter 2025 timetable data, illustrating how lateness, gaps, and ricochet propagate from terminals (especially Harvard) through the route. It ties reliability to terminal design, traffic congestion, and street design, and argues that improvements require both operational changes (active service management) and infrastructure/policy investments (bus priority, optimized turn times, better scheduling). The piece emphasizes that small outlier trips and terminal bottlenecks drive most gaps, with broader implications for network-wide reliability and policy decisions.