BusTime, the MTA's attempt to make it easier to know when your bus will arrive, comes to Manhattan on Monday. But for its debut on the island it will at first only be available for the incredibly slow M34 and M34A Select Bus Service—a regular contender in the annual Pokey Awards. Still, progress!
BusTime is expected to be available citywide by next year, but currently it is only available on Staten Island and on the B63 line it was first tested on. The open-source service is, when it works, actually pretty easy though (as long as you can use a smartphone). Riders can either text their bus stop's number to 511123 (the stop's number is, or will be soon, printed on the bus stop pole) or they can scan a QR code at the stop. Either way a user will then either be taken to a webpage or sent a text message with information on where their next bus is. You can try the web side of it out for yourself at bustime.mta.info.
One downside about the addition of BusTime to the M34 lines? It means that those countdown clocks they put up in 2009 are not going to work anymore. Not that they were that useful anyway—most of the time if you want to know when the next bus is coming on 34th Street all you have to do is look down the block to where it has been sitting in traffic for the last ten minutes—but we're sure some shopping grannies are not going to be amused.
