Tag: 30-Stockton

Rocking Muni for the Giants

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Video by Amber Wolf of Wiz Bang Photography

You might’ve heard that a local baseball team did the biggest thing U.S. baseball teams can do last night. That’s right, the 2010 San Francisco Giants won the fucking World Series, y’all! And Muni was right in the thick of the wild celebration.

Watch the 33-Stanyan wade through the thicket of toilet paper and Giants fans in the Castro in the video above.

Fans in the Marina atop a 30-Stockton (photo by @jcsnotes):

More fans in the Marina took over the 2-Clement (photo by SHUN [iamtekn]:
San Francisco Giants 2010 World Series Champions

San Francisco Giants 2010 World Series Champions

I got a couple of pictures of guys hopping on top of a soon-to-be-stranded 14-Mission, on Mission Street, in (you guessed it) the Mission:

Amy grabbed this short video of that same 14-Mission:

Ariel has a shot of the 22-Fillmore stuck in the Mission:
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Giants fans on Muni were burning up Twitter last night too:

“Some guy stepping off the L announced GIANTS 3-0!! Driver repeated it over the PA. No reaction from riders. Me: Really? Giants!” @wallbounce

“people are sitting on 30s here on Chestnut. First Clipper now this. Anarchy!! Let’s go Giants clap x5” @jcsnotes

“28 driver now leading @SFGiants cheer.” @dalbizo

“I’ve never experienced anything like last night in SF after the win… I just remember running through cloudy MUNI buses #SFGiants” @cementone

Indeed. Indeed.

Congrats to the 2010 San Francisco Giants!

Category: diaries, reflection Tags: , , , ,

Photographer Kristen Holden: Love Stories on Muni

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Photographer, poet, and model Kristen Holden‘s pictures of Muni riders have caught our eye for a while. We found her on Flickr as “SFLoveStory” and tracked her down to find out what makes Muni such a great subject. Holden grew up in Chicago and has lived in San Francisco for almost seven years. She lives in Russian Hill with her musician boyfriend and their “talentless dog.”

What is it about Muni that inspires you to take photos there?

This simple answer is: I ride a lot and I shoot my surroundings more than I do anything else. But what makes Muni rife for photographic capture is that the exterior environment is always changing around the same structure or, like, bones of the scene. There are endless characters to make up stories about.

What’s it like taking pictures on Muni?

I think people generally assume I’m a tourist. Once in a while someone will ask me about my camera and why I shoot film (I’m currently shooting with a second-hand Canon EOS Elan II SLR with a Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens.)

Got a favorite Muni line?

I ride the 45 and 30 to get from Russian Hill, where I live, to downtown and vice versa. I take the 47 and 49 quite a bit. Oh, and I’m one of those weird people who actually rides the 19…it gets the closest to the film-processing center I go to in SoMa. I love the cable cars and streetcars too. The mint-green colored streetcar from Brooklyn (Car 1059?) is my favorite.

You can see more of Holden’s photographs on her website, Kristen-Holden.com.

Category: diaries, Photos, reflection Tags: , , , , ,

A short, angry discussion of taxes on the 30-Stockton

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Photo by Flickr user happy bachelor

This delightful tale came to our inbox from Muni rider Andrew …

It wasn’t so fun at the time, now that I think of it, but it’s funny in retrospect.

My girlfriend and I are regular 30-Stockton riders, from North Point & Hyde to Sutter & Stockton. As you may know, the 30-Stockton is a risk-life-and-limb kind of line (especially around 8:30am) but we were lucky enough after work last week to find ourselves on a relatively empty outbound 30 where we could safely sit in the far-back facing-inward seats without worrying about cans shuffling or random bowel movements.

Boarding with us were two young gentlemen, one of fifteen years (or so he later said) and one in his mid-twenties. The younger sat in the set of facing-inward seats across the aisle, while the other sat close to the back door.  And no sooner had we cleared the tunnel when the fifteen-year-old pulls a quarter out of his pocket and begins scrawling Heaven-knows-what into his plastic seat back.

My girlfriend, not one to take vandalism figuratively sitting down, shouts, “Hey, kid, cut that out!”

No response.

“Hey! STOP.”

Now he looks up. “Hey, I can do what I want.” (yes, this is the most stereotypical teenager phrase ever. I wanted to say, “really? So I can rip your ass a second hole because I WANT to?” But he was a minor, and should a police report get filed, I wanted to keep my mentions of his ass to a minimum.)

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Category: diaries, Funny: Muni LOLs Tags: ,

About the Chicken Story (and Perils of Running a User-Generated Site)

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I was standing on the side of the stage at the Make-Out Room last Friday at Riders with Drinks when our emcee Suzanne brought up four members of the audience to tell their own Muni story. As one of the audience members began to tell a story about an Asian (Chinese?) woman bringing a live chicken on the bus, I cringed. The story sounded uncomfortably familiar.

In the story, the bus driver tells the woman that live animals are not allowed on board. NonplussedUnaffected, she snaps the chicken’s neck and boards the bus.

Minutes later another writer in the audience approached us and echoed my discomfort: This story sounded remarkably like an urban legend she had heard before.  When it was time to give away a prize to the best storyteller, the audience chanted, “Chicken! Chicken!” I felt even more uncomfortable. In the chaos of running an event, we did not have a chance to intervene on stage, but the “chicken story” stayed in my mind all weekend.

A little internet search showed that various forms of the “chicken story” has been circulating the city for a few years. But if an audience member said that she witnessed the story first-hand, isn’t that the end of story?

Not for us.

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Category: reflection Tags:

What are your feelings about the Central Subway project?

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fourth-stockton-modified-lpa-alignmentMaybe you live along the existing T-Third route and would like to see the line extended farther north. Maybe you live in Chinatown, and would love an easier way than the 30 or 45 to hop over to SOMA or Mission Bay. Maybe you don’t live in either area, and are concerned about the costs and/or environmental impacts inherent in this estimated $1.57 billion, massive-construction project. Or maybe you’re just a transit geek, like us, and love all things rail.

Give Rachel Gordon’s post on the City Insider a quick read, and let us know your thoughts about the Central Subway project.

Category: News Tags: , ,

Next stop, Washington Square?

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There’s a light at the end of the tunnel and it’s definitely an oncoming train. The question is, is it a good thing for North Beach or not?

Locals, at least those who are members of the District 3 Democratic Club, seemed divided on the subject of the Central Subway, which was the featured topic at Thursday night’s special meeting of the D3DC at the Telegraph Hill Neighborhood Center. A well-chosen panel — representing both Muni (or, if you must, MTA) and grassroots interests — tossed the subject around, both among themselves and with the lively audience.

If you’ve been living in a cave for the past few years, the Central Subway (known sarcastically to its detractors as the Rose Pak Memorial Tunnel) is Muni’s planned extension of the T-Third rail line across Market Street and up Stockton into the very belly of Chinatown.

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Category: News Tags: , , , ,
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