Category: Muni

More “red carpet” Muni/taxi lanes coming soon to the Mission?

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Ooh boy, 16th Street gonna get even gnarlier! The Examiner reports:

Muni’s latest experiment, the “red carpet” transit-only lanes has split San Franciscans’ opinions, but now the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is contemplating at least 50 new streets to play host to the transit lanes.

Bus riders and numerous studies say they’re a boon to transit, speeding up the previously molasses-slow buses and trains during commute hours. An alliance of homeowners and merchants, however, decry the lanes for making traveling by car more difficult, potentially driving away customers from mom and pop shops.

Read on for more of the story and the complete citywide map.

New bus-and-taxi-only lanes going in on Mission Street today

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Just walked past this scene, out by 30th and Mission.

SF Gate has more details:

The painting should be done by March or April, at which time the Municipal Transportation Agency will start banning left turns at every intersection between 14th and Cesar Chavez streets and requiring right turns off of Mission Street at 16th, 20th, 22nd, 24th and 26th streets. [link]

So if you’re like me and love driving all the way down Mission Street, you better do it now while you still can. (Also, they eliminated some inefficient bus stops, so make sure your favorite stops still exist before trying to use them.)

Google buses are out of control

Our pal Inna saw her life flash before her eyes this morning:

Ok not even funny anymore – I just had a terrifying moment with a Google bus turning from 24th onto valencia that nearly killed me and one other person. We had the green light still – it was very clearly green, and he just plowed into the intersection. Cars stopped and honked, people screamed, and even google’s minions waiting in line to board the thing looked up from their phones.

I don’t even know what to do – who do I complain to? Who will listen or care? It’s simply not safe for these gigantic buses to have complete reign of the streets. It’s a terrible feeling to not feel welcome in your own city- this is the icing on the cake.

I also experienced a harrowing moment last week while biking north on Valencia approaching 25th Street.  One of the behemoth buses pulled up alongside me and then tried to beat me to the stop on the NE corner, almost pinning me to the sidewalk.  Luckily I was able to maintain control of my bike and sprint past it, but damn!

I don’t drive, but if I did I would be livid with these buses.  I routinely see a tech bus chilling at a green light waiting for another tech bus in front of it to finish its business at the stop located across the intersection.  So imagine you’re stopped behind a bus at a green light and it just sits there for a couple minutes while the lights cycle through, and finally when the first bus is finsished unloading or dropping off or whatever does that green-light-chilling bus cross the intersection and awkwardly pull over in just enough of a diagonal to continue blocking the street.

Did we really kill the 26 Valencia Muni just so these giant out of-control buses could run wild?  I know it’s a broken record at this point, but just remember that these buses are another example of something that incoveniences (and sometimes endangers) the public and whose only benefit is increasing profit for private companies (by enhancing their recruiting efforts and employee productivity).

Essentially, all the buses really do is transfer the extra minutes that their employees would have to wait if they took regular public transportation along to everybody else.

Previously:

When your Muni train takes a detour and ends up at Patogo Station

Local commuter David Enos tells us about a little Muni mishap:

“Hello? Are you on your way home yet? Where are you?”

“My train…it went the wrong way.  Can you pick me up? I’m lost.”

“Where are you?”

“Patogo.”

“Where?”

“I think it’s close to Ingleside, maybe South of City College, I don’t know.  Can you look it up on maps?”

Read on for the full story. (And be sure to bookmark David Enos and read his blog every day.)

[Photo by David Lytle]

This Thursday: PUBlic Transit Crawl on the 14 Valentine Line!

Artist, transit activist, and Mission Mission reader Ilyse, whose projects we’ve posted about before, has been leading a series of pub crawls on public transit routes (aka PUBlic Transit Crawls) to raise money for the SF Transit Riders Union. The next crawl takes place this Thursday in the Mission, and in honor of Valentine’s Day, it’s along the 14 bus route.

Here are the details:

Starting Point: 16th/Mission BART
Date/Time: Thursday, February 12, 6-10pm

Schedule:
6PM: Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, 2323 Mission St (btw 19th St and 20th St)
7PM: El Rio, 3158 Mission St (at Precita Ave)
8PM: St. Mary’s Pub, 3845 Mission St (at College St and Crescent St)
9PM: Pissed Off Pete’s, 4528 Mission St (btw Santa Rosa St and Ocean Ave)

Read more about the crawl at the SF Transit Union’s website.

RSVP and invite your friends!

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Sometimes you’re watching your Muni driver karaoke ‘La Bamba’ in the middle of a Muni ride and then he hands you the mic because he has to go back to piloting the Muni, so you have to finish ‘La Bamba’ for him

Sometimes your MUNI driver needs you to finish La Bamba for him so he can drive the train.

A video posted by Ellen Black (@ellen__black) on

//platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js

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‘Muni Rap’ celebrates current events

Local transit aficionado and musician Ticklefight just published this beauty:

MUNI RAP

Ottawa Ebola Renee Royals
World’s Ending Fast, Where’s My Aluminum Foils
Evictions Elections Soccer Denials
Chinatown Bus Hatred for Miles
White House Fence, Ain’t So Strong
Yosemite Graffiti Everything’s Wrong

Can’t wait to see the next verse!

[link]

[Photo by Tegan]

Community forum on housing and transit tomorrow!

Do you have complaints about the housing crisis and public transit in San Francisco? (Let’s face it, we all do.) If so, join the SF Bay Guardian and SF Transit Riders Union tomorrow for a joint community forum on funding for transit and housing affordability.

Here’s what SFBG and SFTRU have to say about this event:

San Francisco needs more affordable housing, a robust public transit system, and fully funded social services if it is to remain an efficient, diverse, compassionate city. Unfortunately, some political leaders have pitted transportation and housing activists against one another in recent years, particularly so in the upcoming election on Propositions A, B, G, K, and L.

We’ll provide some background for you on how public transportation service and facilities are paid for, and then we’ll examine how the conflict happened, the political tactics that are being employed, and what can be done to bridge the gap along with a panel of activists and experts.

Bridging the Gaps in Transit and Housing Funding
A joint Bay Guardian and SF Transit Riders community forum
Thursday, October 9th, 6-8PM
LGBT Center, Rainbow Room
1800 Market St, SF

Moderators:
Steve Jones and Rebecca Bowe, San Francisco Bay Guardian

Speakers:
Thea Selby, San Francisco Transit Riders Union
Jonathan Rewers, SFMTA
Supervisor Scott Wiener, San Francisco District 8
Chema Hernandez Gil, San Francisco Bicycle Coalition
Amandeep Jawa, San Francisco League of Conservation Voters
Peter Cohen and Fernando Marti, SF Council of Community Housing Organizations

RSVP on Facebook or non-Facebook and invite your friends and other concerned citizens!

[Thanks, Ilyse!]

Should Muni launch a new bus route to help tech workers get to Caltrain faster?

A Bernalwood reader makes the case:

First, Yellow Cab and FedEx drivers could take the bus to their workplaces, which are within a block of this stretch of Cesar Chavez. But primarily, Caltrain has become an essential way for SIlicon Valley workers to get to their jobs. Catrain ridership is at historic highs, and 1500 workers now board Caltrain at 22nd St. every morning, headed for points south.

Right now, there’s no easy way to get to the 22nd Street Station. Yes, you can take the 48-Quintara down 24th St. and over the hill, but this takes a very long time. It would be so much quicker for the bus to head down our remade Cesar Chavez, bypassing Potrero Hill, making a turn at Third St., and heading straight for the station. I’ll bet it would save at least 15 minutes vs. a comparable trip on the 48.

Read on.

Should you pay your ‘fare share’ on Muni?

Muni fares increased yesterday.

So, via old-school San Franciscans Shimshang and Crazycrab, this old-school hacked billboard:

Boy, imagine a time when billboards were owned by a little company founded by two Northern California boys, Foster and Kleiser, rather than international media conglomerates like CBS and Clear Channel. More about all that here.

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For a change, a rant about why you should appreciate Muni

From local blogger anadromy, who most recently delivered a similarly posi rant about why you shouldn’t necessarily hate on tech bros, some thoughts on the transit situation here in Frisco:

People in San Francisco don’t agree on much, but just about everybody likes to hate on MUNI. The system takes a lot of grief, much of it justified. But I grew up in So-Cal, a place with notoriously rotten public transit, so even when I’m fuming with several hundred other stranded souls as an N Judah languishes between Van Ness and Civic Center, I try to remember that MUNI, for all its faults, is a far sight better than what I had to deal with as a kid. I also try to feel grateful that I get to live in a city where you (usually) can use public transportation to get around, because I believe mass transit creates a better society. It’s a wonderful social equalizer and it brings all kinds of different people into contact with each other. Sometimes this contact can be unwelcome or unpleasant, but so what? That’s kinda the point. Most people in Los Angeles don’t get the privilege of standing on crowded buses or trains with all sorts and sundry of humanity. They seal themselves inside their cars. In my opinion, this mass isolation instead of mass exposure is one of the main reasons LA sucks. It appeals to and caters to a certain kind of personality. Not that everyone in LA is a preening narcissist. (I dig LA in a lot of ways, and the people who live there. It’s a grittier, more diverse city than SF.) But let’s be real. Its preening-narcissists-per-capita quotient is quite high. The same is true for Silicon Valley, which—not coincidentally—also has shitty public transit.

And actually, this is all just a preamble to the real story, so read on.

[Photo by Nikki]

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