Travelling Riverside Blues

That crack investigative team at ABC 7 & is at it again with a story about MUNI being a little huffy about people digging into their safety records. At issue is Dan Noyes and his I-Team looking through records to see if they could determine which drivers have gotten the most complaints. When the union that represents MUNI drivers heard what they were doing, they went to court to prevent them from looking the records over. The union is claiming that they want to prevent personal information from getting out in the world while ABC7 is saying that it's not like the news channel is going to release social security numbers or birth dates and only wants to see which drivers cause the most trouble.

On Friday, a judge ruled against the union but said that the city could redact or black out personal information as they see fit. If this was the Bush administration, that would mean the entire thing would be blacked out but we'll see what happens in this one.

In just the little digging the ABC7 has done, they have discovered that twenty-five drivers have accounted for over 1,000 complaints but only two have met with any disciplinary action.

And in other transportation related news, the MTA is saying that all the recent spate of attacks on parking control officer's might be resulting in their being a ten year low in ticket citations. Last year, twenty-eight Lovely Rita Meter Maids were assaulted. Of course, this could just mean that people are doing a much better job of parking and....yeah right. Other reasons for the low number of citations range from increased ticket rates to parking control officers having to do more traffic control and not enough officers.

Jake McGoldrick will hold a meeting this Wednesday to go over the issue.