Muni Diaries

Photo by idealisms

According to reports from Tuesday’s SFMTA board meeting, something like free Muni for kids has made it onto the budget for the next couple of years.

The board favored a free youth pass program for low-income students, but members weren’t convinced that expanding the proposal to include anyone under 17 would be worth the trade-offs in cuts to Muni maintenance that staff presented to the board — at least in this budget cycle.

The two-year budget must now be approved by the Board of Supervisors before going into effect. Read Streetsblog SF for more.

Photo by Matt Biddulph

The Bay Citizen reports that, as a way to trim overtime pay to its operators, Muni has been eliminating runs.

The transit agency has stopped paying overtime to replace drivers who call in sick. Instead, it is simply letting absent drivers’ buses sit idly in the yard, while riders wonder where they are.

Eight buses a day, on average, do not make their regularly scheduled runs as a result of the new practice, according to San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesman Paul Rose.

Read the rest of The Bay Citizen‘s report.

Pretty shady, if you ask us. What do you think: Would you rather SFMTA save money on overtime costs, or, uh, NOT catch the bus when it’s scheduled? How would you cut down on overtime costs? We’d all rather have our buses arrive when and where they should, but since that’s apparently a problem…

SFMTA has been using forward-facing cameras on Muni to catch drivers parked illegally in transit-only lanes. This time the ticket went to KRON 4’s tech reporter Gabe Slate, who looks pretty peeved about getting fined.

The transit lane camera enforcement isn’t new — it actually started in January of 2008. The pilot project installed cameras on some Muni buses to detect transit-lane parking violations. In February the Examiner reported that the program will be expanded to all Muni buses in the next 15 months.

KRON4’s Stanley Roberts had some level-headed tips: “My advice? Stay out of the transit lanes and the bus stops. Or better yet, some people should just get to the bus.”