Muni Diaries

Photo by Flickr user Jamison Weiser

Media attention has turned to the manual controls of the Muni trains in the West Portal accident. We received the following email from rider and West Portal resident Mark:

Let me first say that my heart goes out to all of those who were injured Saturday afternoon in the Muni accident at West Portal.  That said, I feel like it is necessary to speak my mind on what happened because I feel that I have a unique opinion which I have not yet seen expressed by anyone in the media.

As of Monday, the media has finally drawn its attention to the procedure of taking trains off control of the ATC [editor’s note: Automatic Train Control] prior to entering West Portal Station.  As a long-time resident of the West Portal area, I know that this has been going on almost ever since the ATC went online; any regular Muni patron knows this as well. If there is no train currently in the station, the ATC brings the train in.  If there is already a train in the station, especially if it’s only a one-car train, as it was on Saturday, once the ATC has stopped the train outside of the station, drivers usually switch off the computer and take the train in manually so two trains can load/unload at the same time.  This is a very efficient procedure because West Portal is both a bottleneck inbound and outbound, as only one train can enter/exit at a time, so often during commute hours trains will be waiting to enter/exit West Portal Station.  By allowing the driver to bring in the train in manual mode, the driver takes full advantage of the three-car length platform and speeds things up a bit, which in my experience makes a big difference.

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