Spiffiness for a Certain F-Car, Mate
As SFist’s Mattymatt points out, F car 496 unveiled a refurbished look Friday. Transit lovers everywhere will surely rejoice, right?
(Update) Dinner break for all 49 operators?
Update: KRON-4 has the latest on what may be the cause of the transit snarl, a suspicious package left at the Chinese Consulate near Japantown. Tara got a cab, and her cabbie was told to avoid Geary at all costs.
Original post: Yeah, it’s Friday. It’s felt like a longer week than normal for a lot of us.
But you knew the positivity couldn’t last, didn’t you?
So what, exactly, explains this, eh, Muni?
Tara snapped that out at Van Ness and North Point a few minutes ago. She called to tell me about it, so I decided to check NextBus and see what it had to say. At my stop, 20th and Mission, the 49s heading north to North Point and Van Ness are scheduled as follows:
And Tara just called back to say that her signs read: 14 minutes and 16 minutes, followed by an Arriving, with no bus in sight.
I’ve heard of FAIL, and I’ve heard of Muni FAIL, but this exceeds all expectations of fucked-upitude.
Perhaps Muni and NextBus should look into having the signs read “Buses are broken, look for alternatives now.”
Chest-puffing assholes on the 49
OK, Roguish Passengers on the 49. We need to talk.
Just when I was having polite, inane conversation with the slightly off-kilter woman next to me, you two up the ante and start bickering like kids in a sandbox. After she fled from the bus like it was on fire (thanks to you two), all I had left to do was watch you assholes fight over who stole whose shovel from the pail.
All I can gather is that Roguish Passenger 1 touched RP2 wrong. RP1 kept insisting he didn’t mean to, but for some reason, chests were puffed, voices were raised and everyone in the back of the pee-pee smelling bus (evening commute bonus!) looked around hopelessly for a flak jacket.
Props to the big guy with a briefcase who suggested the homies (his word, not mine) calm their asses down and stop starting shit. You’re far braver than I, Briefcase Man.
Driver Cellphone Ban
On my way to class Tuesday night on the 43 outbound, my Muni driver inexplicably hopped off the bus at the Laguna Honda stop. At first I thought the bus had a mechanical problem, but the driver was acting a bit erratically — stepping on and off the fully powered bus while talking on his cellphone. Each time he stepped back on, we riders cocked our heads expectantly his way, hoping for some sort of announcement about why a perfectly functional bus wasn’t approaching our destination.
After about 13 minutes of idling (I was astutely watching the scrolling clock tick away on the digital placard), the driver reclaimed his seat at the wheel and resumed our route.
Faster Munis Make Zoooooom!!!
Well, if only it were so cut-and-dried. The Examiner‘s Mike Aldax has more on the proposal for Muni to run its trains at speeds up to 50 mph in certain stretches of the underground.
My first Muni crash
I was taking the J outbound from downtown to the outer reaches of Church Street a little after 6 p.m. for a class. The ride through the tunnels was mellow, the train was a little crowded, but everything seemed to be going OK. Then we came out of the tunnel, turned onto Church and got about halfway down the block toward Market Street when the driver slammed on her brakes and a bunch of people standing lurched forward.
I pulled off my iPod to see what would happen next.
“We’re gonna be here awhile,” the driver said. She did a few more things behind the wheel, then got out — and let us off the trolley if we wanted to get going.
I stepped down and only then did I see what had happened — the trolley had hit a van that looked like it had just pulled out from Safeway Mecca. The entire front of the train was implanted in the side of the van, which seemed to only have one occupant, the driver, who looked relatively uninjured.
I debated sticking around, but I really needed to get to my class. Passengers poured down to Market Street and made their way onward, talking on cellphones and telling other people about the event they’d just lived through. I hopped on the underground to Castro and took the 35 the rest of the way.
The odd thing is, after covering lots of Muni crashes, it was almost a non-event being in one (especially since nobody was hurt). It took me about two or three hours to realize, hey, I was just in a train accident.
I really hope that van driver is OK.
— Beth W.