Trolley-Tracking Comes to MBTA Green Line

Boston’s MBTA extends "when will my train come?" countdown capability to last transit line

How long until my trolley comes? It’s a question thousands of riders of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s Green Line ask every day.

For up to five years, riders of Boston’s three other subway lines – the Red, Orange, and Blue – and buses have been able to get an answer to when their ride will come from countdown clocks and smartphone services.

Starting Thursday, there’s finally an app for that on the Green Line, used by close to 250,000 riders a day, now that the T has finished outfitting most of its Green Line streetcars with GPS transponders and making the trolley-location data they send back available to application developers.

"The biggest challenge was locating the trains in the first place," T special assistant Dominick Tribone said in an interview Thursday afternoon. Now that the T gets real-time GPS location of Green Line trolleys, it has begin sharing that data in the same way it shares GPS-based bus location information and signal-derived subway car location with developers of "Where's My Train?" and "Where’s My Bus?" apps.

"We push it out to them in the exact same feed that they're used to seeing," Tribone said. "So the beauty of this is there's nothing new for them to learn … What they've been able to do is take this location information, this train is at this latititude and longitude coordinate, and turn it into this train is ‘X’ stops away."

Jeff Lopes and Randy Dailey, who work for the Boston tech company Localytics, co-created a free smartphone app called ProximiT, which more than 100,000 people have downloaded and more than 30,000 regularly use to track the time until the next Red, Orange, or Blue Line train arrives at their stop. "Since we launched last year," Lopes said, "the Green Line has been our number one requested feature."

"We’re every bit as excited as riders will be to have this information," Lopes said. "Anything we can do to help you figure out how to optimize your daily commute, how to spend less time actually standing in the station waiting for the trains, that’s the space we want to be in." The T is making the same information available to dozens of other app developers who want to incorporate real-time train location information.

For now, the T doesn’t have the ability to track Green Line trolleys when they enter the tunnel between Kenmore and Symphony Stations and North Station to the east. But Tribone said they hope to have that in place soon. "Technology to track the trains in the subway has to be installed, and that we're targeting for winter," Tribone said.

Also by the end of the year, the T hopes to use the tracking software to add a countdown clock for inbound and outbound trolleys to the Riverside D branch of the Green Line, so people waiting at stations in Brookline and Newton will know how long until the next train comes. (The D branch is the only one fully separated from vehicular city street traffic, so adding countdown-clock capabilities to the Commonwealth Avenue, Beacon Street, and Huntington Avenue/Heath Street lines is considered too complicated and expensive for now.)

MBTA General Manager Dr. Beverly Scott said besides giving riders better information to plan their trips and understand when they may be delayed and by how much, the technology behind the "where’s my trolley?" upgrade is also providing critically value information to MBTA dispatchers and inspectors.

"Where are my cars? What’s happening? It’s been an unbelievable hindrance," Scott said of the challenge facing Green Line dispatchers. The graphic display can now enable them to see, far sooner than if they had to rely on reports from inspectors on the ground or trolley operators, that there are, for example, three trains bunched up, riders piling up at stops, and it’s time to run a trolley express past several stops to get back to a more regular operation.

"You need to be as informed as you can be to be able to make the decision about diversion, to be able to make the decision in terms of, ‘OK? What do you do?'"Scott said. The GPS upgrade offers "the best information available. That's what this gives us the opportunity to do. And I've got a quarter of a million people that are hoping that we get it right when we're making this decision."

With videographer Mike Bellwin 

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