Muni Diaries

On my way to class Tuesday night on the 43 outbound, my Muni driver inexplicably hopped off the bus at the Laguna Honda stop. At first I thought the bus had a mechanical problem, but the driver was acting a bit erratically — stepping on and off the fully powered bus while talking on his cellphone. Each time he stepped back on, we riders cocked our heads expectantly his way, hoping for some sort of announcement about why a perfectly functional bus wasn’t approaching our destination.

After about 13 minutes of idling (I was astutely watching the scrolling clock tick away on the digital placard), the driver reclaimed his seat at the wheel and resumed our route.

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Well, if only it were so cut-and-dried. The Examiner‘s Mike Aldax has more on the proposal for Muni to run its trains at speeds up to 50 mph in certain stretches of the underground.

I was taking the J outbound from downtown to the outer reaches of Church Street a little after 6 p.m. for a class. The ride through the tunnels was mellow, the train was a little crowded, but everything seemed to be going OK. Then we came out of the tunnel, turned onto Church and got about halfway down the block toward Market Street when the driver slammed on her brakes and a bunch of people standing lurched forward.

I pulled off my iPod to see what would happen next.

“We’re gonna be here awhile,” the driver said. She did a few more things behind the wheel, then got out — and let us off the trolley if we wanted to get going.

I stepped down and only then did I see what had happened — the trolley had hit a van that looked like it had just pulled out from Safeway Mecca. The entire front of the train was implanted in the side of the van, which seemed to only have one occupant, the driver, who looked relatively uninjured.

I debated sticking around, but I really needed to get to my class. Passengers poured down to Market Street and made their way onward, talking on cellphones and telling other people about the event they’d just lived through. I hopped on the underground to Castro and took the 35 the rest of the way.

The odd thing is, after covering lots of Muni crashes, it was almost a non-event being in one (especially since nobody was hurt). It took me about two or three hours to realize, hey, I was just in a train accident.

I really hope that van driver is OK.

— Beth W.