Revived Lightweight Transit Predictions Page

Jeff Kaufman revived his lightweight MBTA bus predictions page, originally built in 2015 using the NextBus API, after the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority moved to its own API and broke the app. Using Claude, an AI assistant, he one-shot the fix and now uses the page as his daily driver, appreciating its display of prediction staleness. He is now working on improving inbound predictions at Ball Square station with a logger written by Claude.

In 2015 I made https://www.jefftk.com/p/lightweight-bus-predictions-page a little webapp that would use the NextBus API to show predictions for the MBTA: A few years later https://groups.google.com/g/massdotdevelopers/c/8VZVBGFpW M/ they moved from NextBus to their own API, and it stopped working. Back in those days programming required effort, and since there were other apps that did almost what I wanted it wasn't worth it for me to update it. But now that we have genies for better or worse https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87DyyMV0kCY I had Claude one-shot the fix https://github.com/jeffkaufman/nextbus/commit/cfd607c57c214da78044e349d277a81a9bb7c746 : A decade ago I built jefftk.com/nextbus/ which is no more, but the code still exists at ~/code/nextbus . It was a thin wrapper around the MBTA nextbus API, but when they redid their API to no longer use nextbus it wasn't worth it for me anymore. Could you get it working again? And it does: Switching back to this as my daily driver, I especially like that it will show me how stale the prediction is, so I have a better sense of how much to trust it. What set me off on wanting to revive this was being grumpy that the predictions API doesn't do a good job with inbound at Ball Square https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball Square station . Now that I have my own tooling, I'm working on this too: Claude wrote me a logger https://github.com/jeffkaufman/nextbus/blob/master/log termini.py and in a week or so I can have it compare a few prediction approaches and implement. Comment via: facebook, mastodon, bluesky