MBTA Bus Route 79

Usually quick (except during rush hour, when it gets stuck at the Rt 2-​Alewife Parkway intersection) but doesn’t run often enough to be useful. No weekend service. Okay if you’re in Arlington, need to get to the Red Line, and one of these arrives before a 77.

Doesn’t run often enough on weekdays to be useful to me. Doesn’t run on the weekends at all. The only time I take this bus is when I miss the 77 by like 30 seconds because it was tearing down Mass Ave at breakneck speed, hence making my Catch The Bus app slightly inaccurate, and by some crazy stroke of luck there happens to be a 79 that appears before the next 77. But I assure you, this is a very rare occurrence indeed. For every 79 bus that you see, there are five 77 buses. No, I lie. It’s probably more than that.

The most consistently inconsistent bus line running in the Arlington/​North Cambridge area, the 79 is, for whatever reason, the most infuriatingly frustrating of all that originate from or pass through Arlington Heights.
In Somerville I’d always found that the buses that operate with less frequency make up for it in precision and punctuality. In Arlington, this is all inverted, and for whatever reason the drivers of the 79 (and the 62) seem to take pride in either leaving at times so divergent from the posted schedule you wonder whether everything was changed that day, or if the bus you are on is just really late, or exceptionally early — and this if the bus ever comes at all.
They seem to deliberately cancel runs of the 79 on a fairly regular basis, especially in the mornings, for no good reason, and totally unannounced, and even if you are standing right at the bus station at the Heights, and talking to an actual MBTA employee, they seem incapable of giving you a straight forward honest answer and just shrug and fire up another 77 on top of the three that just pulled out.
My new theory is that the Arlington Heights runs are some sort of reform school for recalcitrant drivers, and the 79 of them all is for the very worst of the worst.
All this said, the bus is generally half full to all but empty, even at peak times (probably for all the reasons listed above) and without traffic it can get you to Alewife in the blink of an eye (mostly because the drivers refuse to pick up anyone who doesn’t hurl himself in front of the bus at a stop).
Enjoy