Muni Diaries

Photo by Andrew Sarkarati

A 5-Fulton bus hit a bicyclist this morning and kept going, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. Andrew Sarkarati at MissionMission has a first-person account when he arrived at the scene shortly after the collision.

Passengers yelled at the bus driver to stop, but the driver kept going, reports SFWeekly:

Multiple eyewitnesses on the street confirmed to SF Weekly that the cyclist — whose identity we were unable to ascertain — was hit by the bus, which continued onward. The victim, who was talking to police and appeared to be moving, was loaded onto a gurney and taken away in an ambulance.

Both the Chronicle and SFWeekly are reporting that the bus ran over the front wheel of the woman’s bike, and that there’s no indication that the bus made contact with the bicyclist. Judson True, spokesperson for SFMTA, told the SF Chronicle that the driver should have stopped:

The bicyclist was conscious and appeared to have a scrape on her head as she was loaded into an ambulance in a neck brace. Her injuries are not believed to be life-threatening, True said.

We’ll keep you posted.

Photo by Flickr user cbcastro

Update (11:37 p.m.): SFGate reports that the MTA board today rejected the measure to charge for transfers or cease issuing them at all. Streetsblog SF also has the story. Good news for riders!

Original post: I wish I had a more cheery post to bring you, like, here’s a picture of a really cute kid/dog on the bus or something, but alas, that is not today.

At today’s budget meeting, the SFMTA considered either getting rid of Muni transfers or charging 50 cents for each transfer to close up the budget deficit for the next two years. The Chronicle reports that charging for transfers could generate $7.5 million; getting rid of the transfers altogether would get MTA $20 million. SFMTA has, by the way, $100 million in projected deficit for the next two fiscal years. A proposal to cut Muni service by 5 percent is also on the table, reports San Francisco Business Times.

Streetsblog’s Michael Rhodes wrote that many of MTA’s ideas would be “politically difficult” to execute, and that “eliminating free transfers is almost certain to be stopped in its tracks.”

The MTA board is set to vote on the budget next month, so these proposals are still just ideas right now.

Meanwhile, you might have heard about the alternative transit budget proposal from the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research (SPUR) [pdf], which a Chronicle editorial has called, a “spread-the-pain” approach. That’s certainly preferable to Muni service cuts that transit riders will be facing soon. Right?

Photo by Jamison Wieser

In a dramatic turn of events, Muni operators were out in force at yesterday’s “March Against Muni” at the Powell cable car turn-around, letting the marching Muni riders know that the drivers are not to blame.

“For those keeping score at home, the marching Muni drivers out-marched March Against Muni. And this was no mass movement; perhaps 200 drivers showed up compared to 50 to 100 March Against Muni folks,” Joe Eskenazi reports in the SFWeekly.

More reports from our transit news sources:

– Marching Muni Drivers Overwhelm ‘March Against Muni’ (SF Weekly)
– Transit operators barge into march (Examiner)
– Drivers, riders march to protest Muni cuts (ABC 7)
– March Against Muni: Anti-Muni Protest @ City Hall (a slideshow from SF Weekly)

It might have seemed like the operators were out protesting the protesters. But the operators claim that not to be the case at all. According to the Examiner, their spokesperson says the union’s intent yesterday was to mark “the beginning part of working together.”

In any case, @munialerts declares, “Rally over. Union won.”

More photos after the jump.
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