My giant floppy ears were alerted to a promising development in the MBTA yesterday by the Livejournal community that was set up to moan about its usual ineptitude - they've got together with some sort of national online service provider called NextBus to provide an experimental feed that makes the GPS locations of its buses freely available.

Come on, 111! Come on, 116!

What this means in less dull terms is that it's now possible for people who are web-inclined to tap into that feed and find out where buses are and how long it's likely to take them to arrive at their destinations - and therefore yet another project has been added to my already groaning pile. Only five routes are represented during the trial period and none of them are anywhere near the places I actually travel in Boston, but I spent some time yesterday creating a small page to collect the predictions for individual stops together, then didn't sleep at all due to having some terrible nightmares about buses.

I'm very much looking forward to it being expanded to the rest of the system and taking the guesswork out of the CT2's largely fictional timetable - for now, I've tragically been spending my compile time watching the 111-117 buses race each other to Broadway and Fourth Street remotely via the Internet.