Back door black hole 12.16.10
Photo by freya.gefn
But, sometimes, someone falls off the bus.
This girl was with a handful of friends, and they got off at a Van Ness stop, I forget which one. Something north of Geary. It was Tuesday, and a little rain was still coming down. She was the last one of her crew out. She slipped and fell down and onto the back stairs. Her friends and a guy standing near the door helped her out, but she seemed to bang up her knee and suffer at least a little ego bruising. I had never seen someone fall off the bus, but it reminded me to step carefully on Muni during rainy season. Falling off the bus is so much worse than regular falling, amirite, folks?
The driver stopped the bus and checked to see if she was OK, as I patiently waited for someone to get angry and demand that we get moving again. But that didn’t happen and everyone was deemed OK.
We went along until another stop, and another gal got her grocery bag stuck in the same area, in some no-man’s-land between the back row of seats and the doorway. She was freed after some collective shouting of “back door!” (which actually worked this time), but it made me wonder why this black hole was eating everyone passing through it. User error? Just one of those days?
Bonus: Obvious-Visiting Guy asks his Obvious-Local Friend, “Does shit like this happen on the bus all the time??”
Welcome, friend. And hold on.
Comic book vendor on the 47-Van Ness 12.14.10
Photo by Anna L Conti
Muni rider Charles caught an interesting scene from the back of the 47 last night:
There was a guy attempting to sell comic books and related items to passengers. Periodically, he would hold up things and announce, to no one in particular, the price and perhaps some noteworthy aspect of the items. I wish I could have heard some of his more detailed descriptions, but I was sitting too far away.
Which brings up the question: What else should be sold (legally or not) on Muni?
Seeing the forest for the trees on Muni 11.18.10
Or, maybe that’s a cliché and I shouldn’t call it that. Let’s go with dear-diary moment, instead.
Like everyone who works on this site, I gravitate willfully toward wacky-on-Muni like some kind of masochist. But my perspective is skewed after one too many missed runs, NextBus fiascoes, or just plain ol’ bad timing. I’ve been catching a 47-Van Ness in the evenings, on and off for nearly three years, and it’s all pretty standard fare. But it’s been particularly bad in the evenings, as my phone now habitually returns NextBus results like “19, 29, 39 minutes” after saying 4 minutes when I first started waiting. Say what you will about who and what sucks in this scenario, but, until recently, that was unusual for me, that time, and that 47 stop at the start of the line.
I tried to self-help by first acknowledging some basic truths. I fucking hate the bus sometimes; there, I said it. But I’m not driving to work, and I’m realistically not going to walk from downtown or ride my bike every day. Cab, shmab.
Therefore: I am taking Muni to work for at least one leg, and I have to deal with it. Dealing with it doesn’t include screaming into a phone about “goddamn shitty drivers standing around doing nothing while we wait in the rain for this fucking bus to leave.” (Who was that woman?)
Yesterday, after receiving still more crappy results from NextBus, I just grabbed an F-Market/Wharves a few minutes later. And I got a seat. And…did you know streetcars are actually really pretty after dark? They’re always pretty, you say? Not at 8:50 a.m. as a commuter.
But, at night; the interior lighting is warm, unlike the unforgiving fluorescence of our standard buses. People aren’t in a hurry. Tourists take pictures as the also-lit-up Embarcadero buildings and Transamerica Pyramid come into view. You can’t see people outside that clearly, so you’re wrapped up in an almost-intimate, cozy transit cocoon, barreling along to Market Street.
How did this turn into a foufy post about the F?
Whether it happens again today, tomorrow, or next week, Muni actually managed to make me hate it and love it in less than 30 minutes. Even if/when the scale tips again toward hatred, I will still use the bus and I will still have to find these moments to keep me sane.
Rejected by Muni. Twice 07.30.10
Photo by shandopics
This diary teeters on the edge between tragic and comic. This driver is Tara’s Newman. The Muni system in the far northeast corner of San Francisco is her white whale. Read on …
Thursday after work, I saw the 47 idling at a red light before turning left at the corner of Beach and Powell. Great: I’m a few steps from the route’s origin, and the light’s still totally red. Surely, if I knock on the door (the bus was technically still touching its stop), I’ll be let on with plenty of time for everyone to be on schedule.
Nope.
The driver acknowledged my knock with a step-back motion, confusing me a bit, then continued to sit there for a few seconds until the light turned green.
And then she left.
I’ve booked it to the second stop before with good results (knowing that the bus has two more lefts to make before it gets there), so I indignantly jogged as best I could with a full gym bag, a yoga mat, and a purse. I was the horse and this bus was my carrot. Surprisingly, I made it to the outside back of the bus at that second stop. A guy stood on the stairs for a second before boarding, then I watched the doors close and the bus roll along.
There is no goddamn way she didn’t see me the second time, which made it even worse. I fumed via voicemail at the stop; yeah, I was that girl screaming obscenities into a phone while toting a peppy pink yoga mat. Welcome, tourists!
It got me thinking of what a driver once said to late arrivals; you can either get on the bus as it leaves a stop, or you can have the bus stay on schedule, but you can’t have both. Is it really one or the other? I’d hope it would be more case-by-case than that, personally.
Tara is saddened, almost to the point of tears on some days, that her only transit options away from Fisherman’s Wharf elude her so regularly.
One Big Pride Party on Muni 06.29.10
Photo by Flickr user SFBart
My Sunday afternoon started with a total Muni fail — waiting for the 47 for half an hour and inching along Van Ness at the speed of walking. But most people seemed to be in a pretty good mood. When I finally got off of the 47 and hopped on the 14L, a girl with a little cross tattooed below her eye ran for the bus and sat next to me, catching her breath. She complimented me on my dress and then started fishing around in her purse. “You want one of these?”
It was this free “Pride Parade Survival Pack” that had little packs of antiacid, Advil, mints, a moist towelette, and sone Band-Aids in it. Totally sweet.
Later in the afternoon, I hopped on a crowded 38-Geary. Two young guys jumped on the bus, one wearing a name tag that said, “Bottom,” and the other guy wearing a button that says…yeah, obviously. I took out my Blackberry to check the time (neurotic habit), and Bottom excitedly says, “Hey, can I scan your barcode? Do you BBM?” I had no idea what he was talking about. “Blackberry Messenger, duh!” The two passengers next to me spent the next five minutes talking about Blackberry Messenger and whether it can scan a barcode tattoo.
If only every day could be this convivial — without the slow-as-molasses traffic.
Pervert on the 47-Van Ness 05.27.10
Photo by coleypauline
Muni rider Annie offers the following tale of … justice?:
I was riding the 47 Van Ness bus one early afternoon. The bus wasn’t very crowded, so I move towards the back of the bus. I decided to sit down on one of the very last row of seats. Sitting on my left was a girl who was blasting rap music. There was also an old guy who was sitting nearby. Due to the noise of the bus, I couldn’t really hear what he was saying. I figured he was probably just talking to himself, and I was reading a book so I didn’t pay much attention.
So it turns out the girl next to me heard what he was saying and called him out for being a creep and a pervert. She begins to shout at him for being an old guy and trying to get with young girls. According to the girl, he had been staring at the three girls who sat directly across from him.
Riding the Muni, I have found that there’s always creeps trying to check out girls and this was no exception. When I get on the bus, I try to notice if there are any weirdos and creeps, but of course as demonstrated, it doesn’t always work. The girl shouts that he’s been trying to get with these girls and saying stuff like “You’re so beautiful” and according to the girl, about to flash his privates on the bus to them.
Once she called him out for being a perv, they began the screaming match. “Bitch, bitch” was thrown back and forth. The old guy tried to defend himself, by saying the girls didn’t say no to him and that it was none of her business. They also threatened to get off the bus and fight each other. The girl stood her ground and said it was her business when he was being a pervert. People started to turn around and stare at him. He decided to get off the bus. Once he did, the girl gets off her seat. She slides open the window and took the cap off her soda cup. Then she aims directly at him and splashes the drink all over him. I grinned when she did this, and saw his astonished and angry face being left behind on the bus.
Once the bus pulls away from the stop, the three girls thank her. They say that they didn’t notice him being a creep, probably because they were just talking amongst themselves. The girl says that she knew what was about to go on and you gotta keep a watch out for perverts.
A few stops later, I get off to get some art supplies. As I walk down the block, I see the pervert and he makes some noise at me. What a creep, I think.
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Photographer Kristen Holden: Love Stories on Muni 04.26.10
Photographer, poet, and model Kristen Holden‘s pictures of Muni riders have caught our eye for a while. We found her on Flickr as “SFLoveStory” and tracked her down to find out what makes Muni such a great subject. Holden grew up in Chicago and has lived in San Francisco for almost seven years. She lives in Russian Hill with her musician boyfriend and their “talentless dog.”
What is it about Muni that inspires you to take photos there?
This simple answer is: I ride a lot and I shoot my surroundings more than I do anything else. But what makes Muni rife for photographic capture is that the exterior environment is always changing around the same structure or, like, bones of the scene. There are endless characters to make up stories about.
What’s it like taking pictures on Muni?
I think people generally assume I’m a tourist. Once in a while someone will ask me about my camera and why I shoot film (I’m currently shooting with a second-hand Canon EOS Elan II SLR with a Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens.)
Got a favorite Muni line?
I ride the 45 and 30 to get from Russian Hill, where I live, to downtown and vice versa. I take the 47 and 49 quite a bit. Oh, and I’m one of those weird people who actually rides the 19…it gets the closest to the film-processing center I go to in SoMa. I love the cable cars and streetcars too. The mint-green colored streetcar from Brooklyn (Car 1059?) is my favorite.
You can see more of Holden’s photographs on her website, Kristen-Holden.com.
Who’s the Muni Love Bandit? 02.01.10
Last year I spotted the same sign on the 47, and just this week rider Jeff Schwartz sent in another one that he spotted on an outbound 71 bus. I just want to know: who is this romantic bandit changing the signs and making our day just a little bit brighter?
The why/where/how of fare inspectors 10.22.09
Photo by Flickr user WeMeantDemocracy
It’s easy for us law-abiding, government-loving socialists to cheer when Muni fare inspectors show up on the bus. And cheer I did this week, when an alpha fare-inspector and her two ticket-wielding comrades showed up on my 47-Van Ness a couple days ago and handed out at least two tickets.
Though some drivers do have the time and desire to come up with creative punishments for fare-jumping, it’s understandable that most of them do not. Enter fare inspectors. Though one guy in front of me complained about Big Brother watching us, I personally don’t think it counts as some kind of police state if the law-enforcers are actually nabbing people who did wrong. Still, once I stopped silently cheering them on from my seat, I did start thinking about the why/where/how of back-door policing.
From an Oct. 19 SFGate story
Fare evasion on Muni occurs most frequently in the afternoon and at night, the study found. Among the lines where the problem is most prevalent are the 9-San Bruno, 14-Mission, 38-Geary and 47-Van Ness, but few are immune.
It doesn’t seem like an accident that the 47, one of four lines called out in this story, ended up with not one, but three fare inspectors the day after this story ran. Great, whatever works, right? But it did lead me to wonder whether the fare-checking would continue in earnest once the story died down and once the SFMTA office was jammed with people contesting their fines.
In other words, I wondered whether this was simply a good show or temporary move to prove that something was being done. Or will fare-jumping significantly decrease in a year’s time? I certainly hope it’s the latter, especially since I’d argue that fare-jumping is easier to eradicate than other types of petty crime.
Let me explain. We learned from an SF Gate story on crime cameras that certain crimes (homicide, drug deals, etc.) are conveniently moved out of the cameras’ range if cameras are around, thereby decreasing the crime in one area and increasing it one block down. Before you know it, it’s a life-size game of whack-a-mole for the police.
Fare-jumping seems more precise than that. If you’re on Van Ness and want to head into the Mission on Muni, the 49-Van Ness or 14-Mission is your only real way to accomplish this. If you know there are fare inspectors on either line, you are either going to pay your fare, take your chances, or find another line to jump if all you’re into is wasting time on the bus. But if there’s regular fare-inspecting, I think jumpers are more easily backed into a corner, as there are only so many lines that can remain uncovered. Especially if there are more fare inspectors on the hottest jumping lines, during the hottest jumping times.
Or maybe this is completely false logic. Nonetheless, fare inspectors really can’t hurt anyone, in my opinion.
Disclaimer: Before I officially lived in SF and carried a trusty FastPass wherever I went (and uh, before I contributed regularly to a transit-oriented website), I’d somewhat regularly sneak onto the back of an F-Market/Wharves line on my way to work. I could have easily paid the then-$1.50 a ride, but I couldn’t be bothered. I didn’t have cash. Muni “owed” me for some transgression. Everyone else was doing it. All of these are poor excuses.
Why Some Muni Drivers Refuse to Do Anything When Something Bad Happens 09.09.09
Photo by Flickr user Jeremy Brooks
The stabbing of an 11-year-old boy on the 49 prompted Muni rider Whole Wheat Toast to send us the following letter.
We’ve all been there before when someone was being assaulted or robbed on Muni. But remember when the kid was stabbed on his very first solo Muni ride? What did the driver do? It doesn’t say in the article. When a middle-aged couple were robbed by a group of sketchy people on the 47, did the driver intervene? Well, it’s possible we all know why the driver doesn’t intervene, but if you do, I’m going to rant about it anyway.
Anyway, I’ve personally known some Muni drivers. But those that I don’t, I’ve seen them get assaulted if they intervened. For example, I was on the 19 just last week heading to the Bayview Pot Fire, when some guy by the Potrero Hill Projects wanted to board the 19. The driver said “This is not a stop” and kept driving. The guy followed the bus. When the driver finally let him on at Wisconsin and 26th, the guy yelled in front of the driver’s face as if he was spitting at him, saying, “You don’t be fucking with me”, or something like that, I couldn’t hear what he was saying. I think he made a death threat to the driver, I don’t remember. But all I remembered was he just stepped on, and went to the back, yelling incoherently, making death threats to the driver, etc. But, the driver just brushed it off.
However, this would be a different case. I knew this driver who used to work at Woods Division, on the 44, at night. When he saw a person run for the bus, he would stop for them whether or not it would be a bus stop. Otherwise he thought he was going to endure retaliation next time around. As soon as he got seniority, he took the first available opportunity to transfer to another division. I won’t reveal what division he works at now.
The same applies to fare-evading. Just last Saturday when I was heading home on the 19, some kids got on at 23rd and De Haro and just went by. And they were under 12. And the driver didn’t do anything about it. Why? Obviously because they’re afraid of being assaulted by some lowlifes who refuse to play by the rules!
So, to wrap things up, most Muni drivers probably don’t want to do anything - not because they don’t care, but probably because they’re afraid of being assaulted if they intervened themselves. Not only that, if they were assaulted, there would be paid sick days, but most can’t afford paid sick days because most have to work to make ends meet.
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