Following-up from Goldy’s post—as someone who has lived in San Francisco for a good chunk of her adult life, there’s only one thing I can say about its public transportation. It sucks. Muni sucks, the underground Muni Metro sucks, and even BART sucks (sometimes).
The only thing that’s good about it is the Night Owl, which gives you an “all night special” so that you can ride for free overnight. Muni sucks even more after the service cuts. The buses almost never show up when they are supposed to—I mean you could have a frigging baby waiting for one—and good luck if you are on one of those electric lines which keeps dropping its sticks and poles.
I have missed countless birthdays, weddings, funerals, and appointments to the dentist because Muni didn’t show up and spent hundreds of dollars of my meagre reporter’s salary on cabs, which are equally bad. The only thing worse than a bad Muni, is a bad BART. Ever been stuck on a BART train for half-an-hour without knowing what the hell is causing the delay? Communication between BART drivers and the control room is so bad that you only get to know why the train wasn’t moving when you read the news later.
The U.S. News & World Report article goes on to say that SF-Oakland were ranked low in terms of public safety. You can say that again. I was mugged by a 16-year-old on the MUNI #21 on my way to work couple of years ago—the little punk grabbed my iPhone and jumped out at a stop near SF City Hall. The entire time I was running after her, the Muni driver did nothing except stick his head out of the window and threaten to drive off with my bag and camera if I didn’t get back on the bus to retrieve it.
I got to make my first citizen’s arrest, but yeah, that’s a good example of why Muni in general is not safe. For more examples, see video above. But as my friends in SF say, “hey, at least it’s there, at least it’s not Seattle.”
Yeah, let’s show examples of the worst of SF Muni and then claim the entire system is just like that.
I’ve been using Muni for 32 years and have never encountered anything like this. But I know this shit happens.
Does anyone think for a moment that nobody gets into fights or gets robbed on the NY subway system? Ditto for any transit system anywhere in the world?
Oh, the “somebody the stole my iPhone and so it must be Muni’s fault” idiot who wrote this piece of shit post is a fucking lunatic. Somebody broke into my car once, so the world is a fucking awful place, right?
Note to Ryah Batt-shit-crazee: There are bad people in the world. Sometimes they use public transportation.
Grow some brain cells.
Ah, here it is: the original BART system proposal. Now, it’s not ideal to be sure: western SF still gets kinda fucked (I swear to god I remember there being a Geary spur; that may have been a later proposal), but it’s still loads better than what eventually ended up being built. (A Piedmont line! Just imagine.)
GarySFBCN: Merely my own datapoint, but honestly? I’ve lived in Philadelphia, NYC, Boston and SF, and while yes, there’s fights and craziness on SEPTA, the MTA and the MBTA, none of them hold a candle to the level of antisocial behavior that I regularly see on MUNI.
A lot of it isn’t MUNI’s fault as such: San Francisco has some pretty unique problems with the homeless and mentally ill, and inevitably a lot of them end up using the bus system as a daytime shelter. But some of it is: late and overstuffed busses being driven by surly incompetent drivers leads inevitably to frayed tempers. Sooner or later someone loses their cool, and it all heads south quickly.
Oh, and very belatedly to #2: a few of the downtown underground stations have vending machines for the Clipper Cards, but primarily you can buy them at any Walgreens or Safeway. Why aren’t there signs at every bus stop informing tourists of this fact? Because MUNI are incompetent on every conceivable level. Sorry about that. 🙁
7, you clearly haven’t been here in a while. It’s supposed to be 13 minutes from my home to my work, it never takes me less than 20. Frequently, it’s over 30 minutes. The longest it’s ever taken me to make my daily commute was 1.5 hours. Our trains now run 20 minutes apart in the evening, and they’re talking about making it 25. There’s so much maintenance to do on the system that the trains have been single-tracking at my station EVERY WEEKEND for over a year, and will continue through the summer (the DC Metro has only 2 tracks, so when they need to work on one, they have to run both directions of trains on the same track…i.e., massive clusterfuck of delays). The employees are running the system into the ground. Half are incompetent, another non-mutually-exclusive half is too lazy to care, and even more appear to actively hate the customers and do everything within their power to make our lives miserable. The cops are arresting people whose passes accidentally didn’t scan while roving groups of hoodlum teens rob and brutally beat totally innocent riders. Being hit by a bus is probably a pretty highly common cause of death in DC, and the #1 cause of insurance claims as bus drivers seem to hit people and/or cars at least weekly. And no one ever gets fired. Ever.
It’s sad, the DC Metro used to rock. I fear it will never achieve its former glory.
In 99% of the bus/subway fights recorded 1) black folks are involved and 2) they are the ones to turn an argument into a physical altercation. Does this represent the racial breakdown of violence on public transportation? Or are violent incidents involving black folks recorded (and on youtube) disproportionately?
@9 My Taishanese is a bit rusty but basically the Chinese woman said that she asked the black woman politely to sit down next to her–twice. Apparently the black woman didn’t appreciate that and began to harass her.There’s a good translation in the comments section of the video.
@27 chak:
“Seattle doesn’t need an extensive public transportation system like SF because Seattle is not as big as SF. However, our light rail is a joke. It seems more like a tourist attraction.”
Seattle has a land area of 83.87 sq mi. SF has a land area of 46.7 sq mi. Seattle is nearly twice as large physically. As for population, Seattle has 600,000 while SF weighs in at 800,000. So SF is a bit larger, but it’s not an enormous difference.
I agree that our light rail is inadequate, but that’s partly because it’s *under construction*.