O txtmuni, why hast thou forsaken me?

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That’s what I’ve been wondering the past couple of weeks. Txtmuni, a wonderful little service that you can use with your cell phone to check when the next bus is coming to your stop, suddenly stopped working a couple of weeks ago. Instead of useful displays of how many minutes I’d have to wait for the next death-trap-on-wheels, it would say “no times avail.”

So I dug up a contact for the guy who runs txtmuni, and finally heard from him today. It turns out that Muni changed all the “stop codes” on the Web site — all the data txtmuni was using to get ITS information. And the guy who runs the site just moved away for grad school and won’t have time to fix things on his end for a while. I get that.

However, he says there’s an alternative; NextBus has its own SMS system, with a slightly different syntax than txtmuni’s, but the same basic functionality. I haven’t tried it yet, but I’m definitely going to. I’ve come to rely on the ability to use my cell phone to find out how long I have to wait.

So, for those of you who wonder, like I did, what happened to txtmuni, that’s the story. For those of you who didn’t know about these handy services, now you do.

— Beth W.

Beth W. is still wondering why txtmuni never had time information for the 38 line, but it’s a moot point now.

Category: diaries

Fire at Castro Station (UPDATE)

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Update: According to a trusted source, the problem is mechanical. Still unsure of where, or what nature. And also, the fire? Can anyone confirm?

Original post: This just in by way of text from roving Muni Diaries field reporter Eugenia Chien:

Fire at Castro Station. K, L, M lines are delayed or not running. They are advising people to take a shuttle on Van Ness. Civic Center Station a mess!

Then:

Now the F is nowhere to be found

Stay tuned for more ….

Category: News Tags: , , ,

the good, the bad and the even worse

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I use the bus because driving and parking sucks in a city. I complain about using the bus because it’s not as good as it should be in these parts, given the aforementioned facts about driving and parking. Sometimes, I have more complex interactions and thoughts about the bus, where I want to strangle everyone on it, but still come away glad I wasn’t too lazy to stand eye-to-eye with my fellow SF residents.

I had one of those mixed experiences on a 38-Geary recently, and am simultaneously glad, horrified and stupefied about the whole thing.

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Category: diaries, WTF: Weirdness on Muni Tags: ,

Learn, Muni, Learn

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You can tell a lot about a system by how it adapts to failure.

I live in SF, I use both BART and Muni regularly. When they work, they’re decent. When things go wrong, it’s an N Judah-flavored apocalypse. If you’ve got an alternate, you take it. If not, you get a cab or walk. It’s a decent bus town, there’s usually a bus a few blocks away. It’ll probably show up within half an hour, and it’ll get you within half a mile, and it’s probably a nice walk anyway. Unless you’re trying to get back to the Sunset, in which case it’s more like a mile and the walk might be foggy. But anyway, there’s half a dozen good noodle places on the way, and you can bitch on your blog later if you swing thataway.

The last week, though, I’ve been staying in Zurich, and using the SVV tram system a lot. Let’s set aside incidentals like perfect adherence to schedule and good coverage and accurate ETA signs. The other day something melted down on the 11 Auzelg/Rehalp line, which runs roughly north/south along the eastern edge of central Zurich. Residential stuff out on the far-northern Auzelg end, shopping and S-Bahn connections a bit closer in, restaurants and bars towards the middle, and gradually more suburban and residential down South towards Rehalp. The nearest analog in SF would probably be the N-Judah or K-Ingleside.

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Category: diaries Tags: ,
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