Your place to share stories on and off the bus.
On the 49 yesterday evening I sat next to this cute little boy holding his gigantic stuffed animal and talking excitedly to his dad in Spanish. The only English words I can make out were, “No Dad, Blackberry Storm…iPhone…Pearl, no, Blackberry Pearl…”
Since when did kids get so sophisticated?
On my way to SPUR’s Blogging in the City event last night, a cross-dressed man boarded with a bulky roll-on luggage that was topped with yet more black garbage bags filled to the brim. He had crooked teeth and a startled, amused look on his face. As he made his way down the aisle he talked to no one in particular a little too loudly.
Passengers around him looked alarmed and shrugged at one another, trying not to notice.
As the cross dresser got up to leave, a girl accidentally bumped into him and muttered, “Sorry.”
“Don’t be SORRY,” he said sarcastically. “Do you know what ‘sorry’ means in the Merriam Webster dictionary? It means ‘worthless.’ WORTHLESS.”
Under her breath, I think the girl said, “That’s not true.”
“YES it is!,” the cross dresser said, “and I don’t need your negativity!”
Photo by Flickr user Poldavo.
What’s the price of preserving history? If you’re Muni, it’s a cool $1.9 million to renovate the city’s first street car, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The San Francisco Street Car #1, the only surviving vehicle of its kind in the city, will undergo renovations in preparation for Muni’s centennial celebration in 2012.
Sure, the streetcar has definite historical significance. According to the Chronicle report:
“Streetcar No. 1 has historical significance,” said Rick Laubscher, president of Market Street Railway, Muni’s nonprofit preservation partner. “This is not only San Francisco’s first publicly owned streetcar, but it’s also America’s first.”
The celebrated double-ended streetcar, built by the W.L. Holman Car Co. of San Francisco, began service on Dec. 28, 1912, running on the now defunct A-Geary line that ran from Geary Boulevard and 39th Avenue in the Richmond District to Kearny and Market streets downtown.
Celebrants showed up to watch the mayor guide the first municipal streetcar down the street – another reminder of San Francisco’s can-do spirit that emerged from the rubble of the devastating earthquake and fire six years earlier.
But seriously, $1.9 million? I thought we had a budget crisis or something.
Surprise, surprise. The 74X Culture Bus is up for a vote and might be doing its last run in September, reports the San Francisco Examiner. Charging a $7 adult fare when you can get to the same places for $1.50 in this economy seems like a bad idea from the beginning, as we reported back in January. According to the Examiner:
The transit agency spent $607,372 between Sept. 27 and Jan. 31to operate the new bus line, and collected only $59,927 in revenue, putting Muni in the red to the tune of $547,445 on the line’s operating costs.
It’s maddening to me to realize that we are facing service cuts and fare hikes, and in the mean time we’ve wasted so much money on some kind of VIP tourist bus that everyone knew was destined to fail anyway.
Muni’s board will vote April 30. Fingers crossed.
Photo by Flickr user paulkimo9.
“Afternoon sun splashes through the rear window of the T as it careens through Dog Patch.”
Photo by Jonathan Snyder (@jonsnyder)
In our last installment of Tara’s interview with SFMTA spokesperson Judson True, we get the skinny on Muni’s image issues, how to keep the agency accountable when riders file complaints, and what the agency is doing to prepare for Bay to Breakers this year.
Muni Diaries: Would you say Muni has an image problem?
JT: You saved the best for last.
It’s an interesting question. The answer I’m trying to take a step back from, in my job and my role now, in the time I’ve worked at the MTA, to think about how I perceived Muni before I worked for the city. I took the 21, I liked it. I’d write down the books people were reading. I’d keep little lists like that. It’s interesting, and I liked Muni, I liked riding it. I was frustrated if the bus passed me at Grove and Gough, which it did sometimes. I’d walk down and take Muni Metro or BART or I’d just walk. Occasionally, I rode my bike to work.
I think the feeling I had about Muni then is fairly similar to how most users in the system feel. That it’s great when it works, and it’s very frustrating when it doesn’t.
A lot of people choose to live here because it’s a city you can live in without a car. I didn’t have a car for five years. In that sense, Muni is successful. BART and the whole system of transportation, even in the Bay Area. Like Caltrain. When my brother was at Stanford, I took Caltrain down to visit him. You can move without a car here.
But Muni has challenges, and I think those are reflected in the negative publicity we occasionally get and the frustration people feel about the system. The people who work here are very sensitive, and they’re working hard to try to improve the system to prevent that perception. Perception is a reflection of reality. I’m not a person who works in media relations because I want to say, “This thing over here is really good,” even if it looks like it isn’t good. Nat Ford is the kind of person who calls it like he sees it, too. That impetus goes throughout the organization.
There’s so much more I can say about that question. My final answer would be, “Yes, but …”