MBTA Bus Route 85

The 85 bus runs between Kendall Square in East Cambridge and Spring Hill in Somerville. Therefore it is useful if you want to go to either of those places. It is relatively unuseful if you want to go to other places such as Watertown, New Bedford, Gainesville, or Turkmenistan.
The 85 bus runs infrequently relative to other MBTA buses and not at all on weekends. However it can occasionally be surprisingly crowded, but usually not packed.

In the six months that I’ve lived in Union Square, this bus has grown on me like fungus under my toenails. The driver is really friendly in that surly, «I-was-born-in-Chelsea-so-don’t-expect-me-to-give-a-shit-because-it’s-7am-and-I’ve-already-been-drinking,» pasty white Boston native sort of way. You know who you are, Sox/​Pats fans. Despite having to navigate the Union Square traffic mêlée both directions on its route, it somehow always arrives on time, except on weekdays when it doesn’t bother to show up at all. This tends to happen on Fridays (like this one), and is completely unannounced, so I’ll assume it’s because the MBTA literally has only one driver available for this route and doesn’t bother to find a replacement for our Chelsea boy and his long weekends spent hugging porcelain in the bathroom of the Tavern at the End of the World.
I’ve also had the pleasure of taking this bus in the middle of the day, when I am literally the only rider for the entire route. It was creepy and the bus really smelled like bad gin and I wouldn’t recommend it. If the MBTA were to do something actually useful like hire a systems analyst, then they might figure out that running routes like this north of the river in the middle of the day when everyone is at work downtown is a huge waste of money. The savings could then be used to not only pay that systems analyst’s crappy government salary, but also would allow the 85 to run later at night when people actually need it, and on weekends, again, when people actually need it.

I like this bus because it’s a couple of blocks from my apartment and it drops me off a mere 5 minute walk from my office. It’s a commuter bus line that runs until around 7:30pm only Monday through Friday. I hate this bus because it seems to run on a random schedule that changes daily. This is mostly because there’s one bus that runs in a loop and it gets stuck in traffic going through Union Square. Also, because there’s only one bus, it only runs about every 40 minutes in the morning — so your choices are 8:10 or 8:40 (give or take a few minutes).
Also, the current bus driver is seriously the most surly individual on the planet. A few weeks ago the buzzer was broken and he just skipped a lot of the stops near/​around Union Square. A woman was standing near the front told him so and he said «Do I LOOK like a mind reader?» and when she explained that standing near the front should signal that she wanted to get off he said «Oh yea? And how’d that work out for you?».
So, if you don’t mind the nasty driver and random arrival times — the 85 bus is a pretty convenient route to get you from Somerville to Cambridge.

Love, thy number is 85…
Wending its leisurely way down from the bucolic heights of Spring Hill, through the early morning logjam of Union Square, across Cambridge St., and then in to the wind blasted wasteland of Kendall via Hampshire St., the 85 is one of the true hidden gems of the MBTA, a model of efficiency and punctuality in the otherwise beleaguered fleet of north of the river buses. This is no mean feat — when a route is composed of a solitary bus doing a continuous half hour round trip loop, you don’t really have much wiggle room for error, but since the buses generally depart on 40 minute intervals, it has enough of a cushion that timeliness (or lack thereof) is never really an issue.
But this is not where my love is born. No, my deep-​seated affection for the 85 arises not from my 15 minute daily commute to work, nor from the fact that it is basically right around the corner from my door, nor from the fact that its departure times on both ends of my day neatly dovetail with my work hours. No, you see, it all really comes from this wonderful feeling of being in on a big secret, that this little route, which, aside from two runs in the morning, is generally pretty sparsely populated, was designed specifically just for me and a handful of the other regular riders who I’ve seen and come to know over the past 7 years. Like it’s our shared treasure. And it’s like the feeling you got when Mr. Rogers would gently insist on your own divine specialness. Like convincing yourself over and over again that «Yes, I AM a unique and individual snowflake» Oh boy, we are special, yes we are!
And yes, it is rather quite sad to receive your daily affirmations of self worth from public transport, but that is just a testament to the sad sad times we live in.