How a bored Brookline teen accidentally renamed an MBTA bus stop. "I was pretty shocked."
What started as a bored teenager's online experiment during the pandemic has turned into a real-life change on MBTA bus routes in the Boston area.
Brendan Libby, now a senior at Brookline High School, said he often passed a small, unnamed road tucked behind a Chestnut Hill apartment complex. In 2021, while bored during the pandemic, the then-14-year-old discovered he could submit edits or suggest names through Google Maps.
"Without thinking, I went in, tried to change it to something," he said.
Named after Boston Braves player
A history and baseball buff, Libby decided to give that unnamed street a name, Maranville Street, after Walter "Rabbit" Maranville, the Springfield-born Baseball Hall of Famer who helped the Boston Braves win the 1914 World Series.
"He was kind of an unknown local celebrity for the Boston Braves, and I thought his name was kind of cool. So that's pretty much why I chose it," he explained.
To his surprise a few days later, Google approved the street name.
At that point, it was nothing more than just an inside family joke, for those that knew if they were on the app. That was until Libby was riding the Route 51 bus to a physical therapy appointment one day, when he heard the onboard announcement.
The bus speaker announced "at Maranville Street" as it approached the nearby stop.
"The AI thing pronounced it, and I kind of got jump-scared," Libby laughed. "The bus name had actually been changed."
The MBTA told WBZ-TV, "Our Service and Planning team does occasionally consult Google Maps to update bus stop names, so this appears to be plausible. This particular stop and the one across the street had their names updated to include the Maranville Street moniker during the summer 2022 service changes."
"I was pretty shocked," Libby said.
Maranville Street sign
He kept the story mostly to himself until posting about it on Reddit, where it quickly took off and drew praise.
"I wasn't intending to get famous by this at any point. I just thought it would be a cool story to share," he said. "But now that people took it kind of seriously, I've kind of been leaning into that."
With an online community now cheering him on, Libby's next goal is convincing the city of Boston to install an actual Maranville Street sign.
"If we could get one address changed to Maranville Street, that's the goal," he said.