The new MBTA website is back up, and it seems to be functional as of this writing. It’s a definite improvement over the old site, if for no other reason than they’ve added google maps with all the train and bus route data on them.

My normal morning commute involves a short bike ride to the Oak Grove orange line stop, and a switch to the red line at downtown crossing. But on days when it’s pouring rain, or snowing, or when my bike’s in the shop, I have to take the 106 bus to the Malden Center stop instead. Trick is, the 106 is one of those bus routes that has about 4-5 different variations (denoted on the paper flyer as some combination of a, b, c, s, and w prefixing the time it leaves the originating station). And the map on that flyer really doesn’t help you figure out what route the different variations actually take.

Thankfully, their new google maps do. Of course, there’s no actual way to tie the “variation” dropdown on the map to one of the prefix combos, or even to one or more runs on the buse schedule table, but at least it’s a start. For instance, it’s let me know that the buses I’d like to be taking in the morning actually traverse the section of the route near my house in reverse of their normal direction. Which, now that I think of it, helps to explain the people waiting at the stop up the road heading in what I thought was kind of the wrong direction for the morning commute.

That aside, the design is fairly clean, it renders well on Firefox and IE on Windows, and generally seems to be much improved.