Chasing Muni for the Endanger Bus Photo Contest


Photo by Todd Gilens

We’re extending the Endanger Bus Photo Competition until May 20th because the buses are going to be in circulation for a few more weeks! That means you still have the chance to win $150 and publication in Bay Nature magazine. These beautifully wrapped buses are the results of a brilliant idea by artist Todd Gilens, who chased down a few of the buses and had a Muni diary of his own:

Buses move slowly when you are on them waiting to get to your destination. But they move very quickly when you are trying to photograph them – and it’s amazing how chaotic the streets are. I was chasing the Butterflybus on the 71 down Noriega toward the beach. A friend was driving; we kept passing the bus, jumping out, then letting it pass us while trying to get a good background, light, etc. Trucks would pull up, the bus wouldn’t stop where we expected, poles were ending up smack in the middle of a shot, it was hard to tell if we got anything.

At the end of the line the driver asked me what we were up to. I told him about the project and about endangered animals and insects. He said, oh yes there used to be a lot more different kinds; now mostly ants. Ha, we both laugh – Argentine ants, he adds. Transit is also an ecosystem, I said. The bus driver agreed and said that the competitors are mostly cars. Time to go; we shake hands, “Nice talking with you!” and off he goes. The light behind me now, I try to get a few last shots as the bus turns onto 47th heading back downtown.

Did you see an Endanger bus today?

Details:
Find the Endangered Species buses and catch them with your camera in motion or at rest.
Enter up to four images by emailing them to endangerbuscontest@baynature.org (minimum 1500 pixels in length or width)
To find the buses, use the real-time bus tracker on Bay Nature’s Endanger Bus page.

Prizes
First place receives $150 and publication in Bay Nature Magazine.
Second place receives two tickets to the San Francisco Zoo and two $10 Clipper Cards.
Five other entrants will be picked at random to receive $10 clipper cards.

ENTRY DEADLINE: 11 p.m., May 20th, 2011.

Weekend Photos: Cheer Up!

lily, on the 30. #muni
Photo by jen_maiser

Well, that was fun, that April 2011. Muni Diaries is a toddler now, a full-on three-year-old website. The San Francisco Giants season is well under way. The weather has taken a turn for the more-pleasant. And today is the last day to vote for Muni Diaries in SF Weekly‘s poll (Best Blog and/or Best Person to Follow on Twitter would be our choice, but we’re biased).

As this editor is wont to do when the skies are so bright, I implore you to stop reading this. Go out and enjoy this shit. It won’t last long.

Muni news this week:

  • Muni Enthusiast Philip Hoffman: An Historic Loss (Market Street Railway)
  • Open-door issues on San Francisco Muni not closed (SF Examiner)
  • Jerry Lee gets four more years on Muni board (City Insider)
  • SFMTA’s Climate Action Strategy Will Require Broad Political Support (Streetsblog SF)
  • BART Trains Set to Run Later Friday Nights (The Bay Citizen)
  • NTSB: Muni Metro driver disabled controls, blacked out(SFGate)
  • University of San Francisco to tackle future of old Muni substation on Fillmore (SF Examiner)

Enjoy these photographs and your weekend!

4.23.11
Photo by lydia chow

MUNI Balloons
Photo by Noodles and Beef

Dog Rides Man, Man Rides Muni
Photo by Generik11

If San Francisco Had a Royal Wedding


Jeni and Keith, photo courtesy Vividotonline.com

Okay, if San Francisco had a royal wedding, Muni probably wouldn’t be involved. But aren’t you sick of watching people who get hitched in a 1902 State Landau carriage, or whatever that thing is? Or are you sick of the people who are sick of the royal wedding?

We found some non-royalties (as far as we know) whose wedding transportation of choice is a little more down to earth. Jeni and Keith met on the 5-Fulton, and the proposal happened right under the Muni shelter where they met. Their graphic designer, Molly Gaines, kept the Muni theme in the couple’s save-the-date cards.

Aw.

Muni is no stranger to love: we gathered all the wedding/love stories we have received in this year’s Valentine’s Day roundup, which includes Eric, who met his wife on the bus, and the love-ly Heather and Ed.

Congrats, Keith and Jeni!

Now, does anybody have Prince Harry’s phone number?

MissionMission’s Ariel Tells All: First Kiss, on Muni

When Ariel Dovas casually mentioned that he had a Muni story he might like to tell on stage, I was already excited enough to have almost spilled my drink. But he followed it up by asking, “Well, is it ok if the story is kind of personal? Like, the bad kind of personal? The kind that really goes deep into that awful awkwardness about being a teenager?”

Ariel, you have no idea.

In this video, Ariel opens Muni Diaries Live’s third anniversary show with his very personal and very awesome story that happened his freshman year in high school.

“I never had a girlfriend before; I never kissed a girl before, but somehow I found out that this really pretty girl, this really cool girl who was a flutist, liked me. Like, like me liked me. I was just overwhelmed but somehow we ended up going out…I mean, going together. It wasn’t “going out” yet. I didn’t really know what to do. I mean, I’d never had a girlfriend before. But I knew some of the first steps that I had to do. So I got rid of all my friends, and spent all my lunches with her; I didn’t talk to anybody else, we held hands, and said I love you a lot. And I was like, this is a lot easier than I thought!”

Oh, but teenage love is never that easy. Watch the video for the rest of Ariel’s story.

Of elevation, excretion, and security on BART

only 3 people please

BART rider Devin heard a voice. Here’s his story:

I passed through Embarcadero station on my way home a few months ago. Got to see the taillights of the train I’d wanted, so I had about ten minutes to kill, and started to do a slow lap of the platform. Part way down the station attendant got on the PA, somewhat brusquely asking “the person in the elevator” to “vacate the elevator immediately.” Somehow these same-station announcements are always jarring. They lack the lumbering, easily ignored and anyway largely inaudible cadence of the BART control center’s own mumbled platitudes. I was also surprised by the inference that anyone in the elevator cold hear the PA to begin with — but perhaps it’s there for just these sort of occasions. Whomever “the person in the elevator” was, they had evidently vacated it by the time I got past the platform elevator, leaving a fresh pair of wheelchair tire tracks in wet liquid.

You can probably see where this is going. After September 11th, BART’s contribution to our collective safety was to close all the toilets in underground stations — which is to say, all the toilets in downtown San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, etc. It’s a fine piece of security theater, an ineffective defense aimed at one particular avenue of imagined attack and serving mainly to annoy and inconvenience everyone else. Though BART denies it publicly, there was probably a budget-conservation motive also — those restrooms can’t have been easy to maintain.

In any event, with the toilets locked, some of their traffic duly shifted to the elevators. It’s a practical choice — BART’s hydraulic elevators are so slow as to provide ample time. You won’t get attacked, and you’ll have some degree of privacy. They’re also mostly ADA compliant, with grab rails and adequate room to maneuver. If you’re homeless and in a wheelchair, and the alternative is paying money you can’t afford for a street-level pay toilet (which presents its own issues), it makes a degree of sense from your point of view.

What makes less sense is keeping the toilets locked, given that doing so doesn’t provide any security and the cost savings is going into cleaning elevators. BART’s elevators were pretty bad even before this; now they’re significantly worse, extra janitorial attention or not. That in turn means that everyone who’s able to avoid them does so, leaving them even more available for alternate uses.

One person who wasn’t able to avoid them was the woman waiting up on the concourse level (along with the station’s janitor, mop and bucket in hand) for that same elevator. She was in a wheelchair too, and had presumably been obliged to get the station management to roust the offender out of there. Then she had to wait while the elevator was cleaned out enough for her own trip down, missing at least a couple of trains in both directions.

Security’s a tricky thing. It’s harder than it sounds. It’s especially hard when you don’t review your own choices to judge their effectiveness and side effects. Reopen the bathrooms, BART. This particular strategy was a bad idea in 2001 and it’s still a bad idea now.

What do you think? Should BART open its restrooms in underground stations?

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