A Brief Exchange on BART

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The following is by Devin

16th and Mission BART, about 5 p.m. on the second-hottest afternoon in recent memory. Agitated Man standing on landing of the east-entrance stairway eating a hamburger out of a McDonald’s bag and intermittently barking Spanish into a cellphone.

Commuter Woman in Skirt passes Agitated Latino Man. Moments later, Agitated Man is throwing hamburger buns at Commuter Woman in Skirt, screaming largely unintelligible remark ending (mundanely) in “comida.” Commuter Woman in Skirt looks annoyed & slightly threatened, but not overly upset (probably because he missed), proceeds down into station.

Moments later, McDonald’s food mostly consumed, Agitated Man gradually starts heading up stairs, passes Irritable Man with Dog. Agitated Latino Man stops to feed rest of hamburger to Dog. Dog, amenable, stops, eats hamburger. Irritable Man screams at Agitated Man (and/or Dog; wording was ambiguous), waves leash. Agitated Man proceeds back up stairs at accelerated pace, groping for cellphone.

Dog, detecting no further hamburger availability, follows Irritable Man into station. Curtain descends.

Photo by Flickr user canadianlookin.

Write us your own Muni or BART vignette —all characters welcome.

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.

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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Casual Complaint on F Ridership Protocol, If There Is Any

Another installment in the continuing saga of WT(F)

An enormous field trip gets on the F at Market and Main, like they often do.

A kid observes that the driver is annoyed because, “We took up the whole bus.”

Well, sort of. More like the whole bus is annoyed that you all packed on during rush hour.

In my perfect Muniverse, field trips, like bikes on BART, would not be allowed on the buses, especially the tiny little streetcars, during rush hour. I think they can do something awesomely educational while they wait for go time.

Thoughts? I swear its not just the cranky post-vacationer speaking here.

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