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After nearly a decade in the shop, Car-Free in Boston is back in service–and, for those who prefer their transportation public rather than private, not a moment too soon.

A compendium of every conceivable way of getting around Greater Boston without getting behind a steering wheel, Car-Free has had loyal fans since 1977, when it was first published by the nonprofit Association for Public Transportation. But some MBTA riders have been worrying that their copies would fall apart before they could get replacements.

After being updated every two years or so, the guide disappeared from bookstores after 1995, when the costs of production became too much for the APT to handle. This year, the group handed publishing duties over to Rubel BikeMaps, a Cambridge-based firm well known in New England’s cycling community.

The new edition, which sells for $10, looks a bit sleeker than its predecessors, with more-detailed maps (including pick-up spots for rent-by-the-hour Zipcars) and bus schedules.

“Our standard is one of being informative without being ridiculously punctilious,” says editor Jeff Perk, who notes that the MBTA “has its idiosyncracies that have grown over the years.” So while Car-Free tries to explain the convoluted fare system of the Green Line, it won’t tell you to watch out for the outdated signs, which in some stations go back to the Carter administration.

While Perk and his staff avoided judgmental language in listing the services of the MBTA and other transportation providers, they had to tread carefully in describing one new feature on the mass-transit landscape. “The Silver Line defied every categorization,” Perk says. “That made for an editorial headache.”

Car-Free ultimately swallowed the MBTA’s party line, describing the Silver Line as “bus rapid transit” and placing its schedule with those of the subway lines rather than the bus routes. The Silver Line, which began operation late last year, currently consists of natural-gas-powered buses running in a “dedicated” lane along Washington Street from downtown to Dudley Square; the T ultimately plans to extend the route through tunnels to the Seaport district and Logan Airport.

But the “bus rapid transit” label rankles Fred Moore, president of the APT, who calls it “the most flagrant misuse of terminology since ‘German Democratic Republic,'” referring to the communist regime in the former East Germany; he says the Silver Line is nothing more than a bus. (Moore often peppers his rhetoric with such politically charged language; the “systemic extermination of light rail,” in which he includes the MBTA ripping up the tracks of the old Green Line branch to Watertown, he refers to as the “trollocaust.”)

The APT was founded in the mid-1960s to fight proposed superhighways through and around Boston–one of which would have traveled the path of the current Orange Line–and the group’s membership has fluctuated in sync with various transportation controversies in Boston, according to Moore. (He says that advocates of a rail link between North and South stations “bailed” from APT after their pet project lost steam.) Moore won’t say how many members his group has today, though he calls it “lean and mean.” He’d be glad to get some new blood, though, and Moore sees Car-Free as a good recruiting tool.

And despite his occasional reference to “bike path hyenas” who want to tear up unused railroad tracks, Moore sees strategic advantage in the publishing partnership between APT and Rubel BikeMaps founder Andy Rubel. “Andy is going to be the bridge builder between the bike lobby and the transit lobby,” says Moore.

Perk agrees, to a point. “Everyone involved with the [Car-Free] project would characterize themselves as rabidly pro-rapid transit,” Perk says, but he adds that the book won’t be used as a platform for more specific political views. “You’ll find no snide comments about the expansion of the Greenbush [commuter-rail] line, for example.”

Though their styles of advocacy may differ, Moore and Perk both see Boston as a great place to be car-less. “All the carping about the T’s ability to govern itself and provide adequate services aside,” Perk says, “by and large Boston is very well served by mass transit.”