Muni - Wanna Guess Where This Is Going?
If you're unlucky enough to be a regular Muni rider, you may have followed the ongoing ridiculousness involving the NextMuni displays at Church Street Station. As you can see above, the display now shows information. True to form, that information manages to be both wrong and useless. As we noted when MUNI pretended to take public comment on the location of these displays, it makes no sense to put arrival information after you've already passed the fare gate. We're already screwed. Why pour salt into our wounds? Why is this display not near the entrance, so we can leave when we see the train isn't going to show up?
After the jump - the rest of our day's journey on Muni. Will they do something right? Will the Breda cars turn into giant robots from Cybertron and actually eat their riders? Follow along and find out!
After a long day of classes at SF State, we were very excited to hop on the M line home in the evening. We were even excited to pay for our ride. However, we were stymied on our first attempt:
Undaunted, we turned around. See, we're veteran riders of the M at SF State, and when one of the ticket machines is broken, we know the secret to paying - there's another ticket machine, right across from the first one:
Ha, ha! The joke was on us! Good thing we had a dollar bill and two quarters, because without that we'd have been unable to pay for our ride. Muni has convenient pay stations right next to the driver at the front of every train:
Dammit. If only there was some space-age technology that allowed you to put a certain amount of money on a rechargeable card and deduct it using a high-tech fare smartcard system, but it's obvious that those systems don't exist yet. After all, the Bay Area is a hotbed of practical technology solutions, and if it hasn't been done here, it can't be done! Given those limitations, we're happy to be unable to pay for a train that we don't know will be half an hour late!