Author: eugenia

Eugenia Chien has been eavesdropping on the 47, 49, or 1 lines since the mid-90's. She lives by the adage, "Anything can happen on Muni" (and also, "That's not water.")

38 Geary Drops Lots of Motor Oil on Geary This P.M. (w/update)

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Update: First, our bad. Jim is the Jim of the estimable SF Citizen blog. Next, according to Jim, this happened 3355 Geary in front of Mel’s Drive-In at around 1:05 p.m.

Original post: Muni rider Jim Herd sent us these photos of a Muni bus dumping what looks like an awful lot of motor oil on Geary this afternoon. Yikes, especially in this hot weather…anybody else see this? Or do we have to wait to read about it in those new SFMTA incident reports?

Thanks, Jim!

If you’ve got your camera lens trained on any Muni happenings, be sure to send some pics our way. You can also email us at muni.diaries.sf@gmail.com.

Category: diaries, News, Photos Tags:

J-Church Newbies

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Ileana at Bored is the New Busy sent over a diary on the J during the Chinese New Year Parade earlier in the year:

I’m on the outbound J, my second favorite train because it comes second closest to my house. I got on at Powell St. station along with a pile of others leaving the Chinese New Year Parade. The crush of bodies boarding the double-time procession of train cars heading anywhere-but-here is unusually dense and unusually overwhelming. We all feel it. We take shallow breaths, inching closer to the edge of the platform, filling one car after another.

Approaching: Outbound K, followed by 2-carNN, followed by one-car J.

The doors on the K open, no one gets off; no one can get on; the doors close. We wait, hope that the NN has room.

A woman in hospital-issue slipper socks squeezes through with the aid of a walker, mumbling, “Why do I bother? What’s the point? Why don’t you all go back to goddamn China? We don’t need your goddamn parade! It’s like I’m not even a citizen in my own country! I can’t even get on my own goddamn train because of you people. You go back to China. You go back to China, all of you! Taking away my rights as a citizen.”

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Category: diaries, reflection Tags:

Don’t Be “Sorry” On The 47

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On my way to SPUR’s Blogging in the City event last night, a cross-dressed man boarded with a bulky roll-on luggage that was topped with yet more black garbage bags filled to the brim. He had crooked teeth and a startled, amused look on his face. As he made his way down the aisle he talked to no one in particular a little too loudly.

Passengers around him looked alarmed and shrugged at one another, trying not to notice.

As the cross dresser got up to leave, a girl accidentally bumped into him and muttered, “Sorry.”

“Don’t be SORRY,” he said sarcastically. “Do you know what ‘sorry’ means in the Merriam Webster dictionary? It means ‘worthless.’  WORTHLESS.”

Under her breath, I think the girl said, “That’s not true.”

“YES it is!,” the cross dresser said, “and I don’t need your negativity!”

Photo by Flickr user Poldavo.

Category: BART, diaries, Funny: Muni LOLs Tags: ,

Muni to Spend $1.9 Million on Renovating SF’s First Street Car

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What’s the price of preserving history? If you’re Muni, it’s a cool $1.9 million to renovate the city’s first street car, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The San Francisco Street Car #1, the only surviving vehicle of its kind in the city, will undergo renovations in preparation for Muni’s centennial celebration in 2012.

Sure, the streetcar has definite historical significance. According to the Chronicle report:

“Streetcar No. 1 has historical significance,” said Rick Laubscher, president of Market Street Railway, Muni’s nonprofit preservation partner. “This is not only San Francisco’s first publicly owned streetcar, but it’s also America’s first.”

The celebrated double-ended streetcar, built by the W.L. Holman Car Co. of San Francisco, began service on Dec. 28, 1912, running on the now defunct A-Geary line that ran from Geary Boulevard and 39th Avenue in the Richmond District to Kearny and Market streets downtown.

Celebrants showed up to watch the mayor guide the first municipal streetcar down the street – another reminder of San Francisco’s can-do spirit that emerged from the rubble of the devastating earthquake and fire six years earlier.

But seriously, $1.9 million? I thought we had a budget crisis or something.

Category: News

Culture Bus On Its Way Out — Maybe?

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Surprise, surprise. The 74X Culture Bus is up for a vote and might be doing its last run in September, reports the San Francisco Examiner. Charging a $7 adult fare when you can get to the same places for $1.50 in this economy seems like a bad idea from the beginning, as we reported back in January. According to the Examiner:

The transit agency spent $607,372 between Sept. 27 and Jan. 31to operate the new bus line, and collected only $59,927 in revenue, putting Muni in the red to the tune of $547,445 on the line’s operating costs.

It’s maddening to me to realize that we are facing service cuts and fare hikes, and in the mean time we’ve wasted so much money on some kind of VIP tourist bus that everyone knew was destined to fail anyway.

Muni’s board will vote April 30. Fingers crossed.

Photo by Flickr user paulkimo9.

Category: News Tags:
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