Service Cuts: The Only Thing MUNI's Good At

A gap of BETWEEN TWO AND FIFTY-EIGHT MINUTES between 33s -- busses that are supposed to run twenty minutes apart?! Are you even serious, MUNI? Get out of our town. No, seriously, get out of our town. Stop hurting America. When we first saw these estimates on the NextBus site, we thought surely it must be a mistake. But don't call them Shirley: after waiting nearly an hour for the next 33, we were believers. Severely pissed-off believers.

Don't get us wrong: we love NextBus, especially the new integration with Google maps. NextBus is the only thing about MUNI that seems to work, and when you consider that it's actually run by a private company and not SF's self-declared transit agency, that isn't much of a surprise. And good news: the Metropolitan Transit Commission just approved an $11 million grant to expand the GPS-based bus-predicting tech to all of MUNI. This will either ease our frustrations by finally making MUNI predictable, or make our head explode when we can see just how systemic the delays are.

Of course, we don't mean to blame the drivers. They do great work, absolutely dynamite. Drivers, you're not worried that NextBus will focus attention on your scheduling inabilities, are you? Hey, if you get too stressed out about it, maybe you should take a sick day. That's what MUNI drivers do best, isn't it?

Update: Michael Smith, NextBus' Director of Engineering, writes,

You will be glad to know that we do more than provide passenger information. We also provide management tools so that transit agencies like Muni can improve their systems and avoid bunching of buses and missed runs. Now that Muni has funding for rolling out the NextBus system to the entire city, it will become an integral part of Muni operations.