October 3, 2007
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!
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Clearly, the MTA does not want your cash. Don't take it personally.
MUNI isn't just a pain in the rear for SFans who depend on it, it's also a civic embarrassment. This city gets so many international visitors, from places like Europe and East Asia where transit works.
What kind of impression does it make when they try to use this dysfunctional "system" with all its handwritten "Out of Order" signs? Or when they sit on an AirBART bus in Oakland that stalls for an extra 5 minutes so that a dozen passengers can barter for exact change?
From what I remember, those ticket and fareboxes are really old. I remember reading in the past that the fareboxes on every bus and metro line is so old that the company that makes them does not even make any of the replacement parts.
The ticket machine at SF state is the same one that used to give out tickets a long time ago for the cable car system. There are much better fare machines out there today, just look at BART's or the NYC MTA Subway system's.
As for Translink... don't bet on it for a couple of more years.
Don't worry about the Europeans, they are used to hand-written out of order signs. I joke that when I was in Spain, "Todo el pais es fuero de servicio!" (imagine an upside down exclamation mark before that sentence).
The fareboxes are at least 13 years old, because they were put in before I was in 3rd grade, but not much more than 17 because I was old enough to remember the old ones which were basically glorified buckets.
The ticket machines on the M-line may be old and crappy, but at least they don't take forever to print like the ones on the N-line do. Although that may just be because they print out smaller tickets.
Well, congrats Dan. You've motivated me to register with gothamist so I can post.
Let me start with: this passes for blogger journalism? Shame on you. This was perhaps one of the most mindless posts I've seen at SFist in the time I've been reading it. Look, I whine about MUNI constantly. I'm the first to admit that MUNI's got a long, long way to go. Hell, I got pissed off enough to start ranting at Natty Ford. But, you, my friend, seem to be ranting about things without facts to back you up.
1.) The NextBus displays. Are you blind or just stupid? For our sake, I hope blind.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/19417968@N00/1448405507/
What do you see in this picture? Ideally you should see a NextBus display IN FRONT OF THE TURNSTILES that indicates arrival times. Having a duplicate sign on the platform is very helpful if you happen to say transfer underground (from an Embarcadero to Caltrain or Sunnydale bound train maybe). Or, if you're contemplating trying to go to Dolores Park and trying to figure out whether you should wait for a J or just take the next thing that comes by. Use your noggin.
2.) Ease of payment. Again, I'm hoping you're blind and not just, you know, really really dumb. You linked to TransLink. Go freaking order one. It's free if you preload it with cash. It even works on EVERY SINGLE LRV in MUNI's fleet. And, as an added bonus, the fare enforcement guys do not have readers (they're in storage for now). Show them your TL card and they'll wave you through without even checking to see if you've paid. Oh, what do I know? I only use my TransLink card on nearly every MUNI trip I take (since it's non-op on the buses for now).
Sorry you didn't like it. A couple of quick responses:
1) I know it's there. The point of this series is that the new displays duplicate information, and that information would be much more useful right at the top of the stairs so you don't have to walk down to the station and down the hall. I mentioned this in my first post about the subject.
2) Interesting information. Why isn't there anything to this effect on Muni's website? Translink.org merely states that "BART, Muni and Caltrain will begin accepting TransLink on all routes starting in spring 2008." Does MUNI hope that we can read their minds so that we can use a SmartCard system that doesn't work on the whole system?
The point of this is these little instances illustrate MUNI's consistently terrible communication with its customers and chronic inability to do things that make their service more consistent and user-friendly.
Oh, and if you're irritated about the broken/not-working LCD displays, don't complain to NextBus, please. Call 311 and complain to MUNI. Like most errors having to do with NextBus, this one isn't their fault.
Big yawn, Dan.
I think that not posting arrival time information at the top of the stairs is a logical and decent decision. The fine people at the Muni don't want you running down the stairs in hot pursuit of your next train and have you knock down granny. Sorry that you are so bummed about the sign locations. You could always call 311 from yr cellphone or a nearby pay phone, then run down the stairs taking out granny in the process. At least that way it is not Muni's fault. And (thanks to cameraphone boy) we all know who is going to pay the bill when granny is decked.
Um, I wouldn't go so far to take Nextbus completely out of the equation when it comes to system failures. Like it or not, they tied their rising star to the Muni - they will reap the benefits of Muni using their technology. There are far too many NextMuni haters in the yay. Hello! SF has the the only transit agency in North America that is so far geeked out over real time transit information and the system has only been in place for 10 years. I say take a deep breath and give the Muni a break. If you are still pissy about NextBus, go back to using the schedules (bwahaha).
Two words regarding communications about Translink and most new Muni projects - SOFT LAUNCH. TL equipment should be installed on the all the buses by the end of the year. Look forward to bitching about how bad TL is working next summer. And yes TL has taken forever to bring to town. Plenty of other systems all over the world use smartcards. When you start to play the blame game remember that TL is a REGIONAL program, so start pointing those greasy fingers at MTC and mainly BART.
Why would BART ever want to give up their lock on the tiny tickets. Have any extra BART passes in your wallet or purse? They add up, you motherscratchers and they would disappear in a minit with a smartcard system. Also think of the cut of the pie that TL/MTC will be taking once BART roles out TL. For everytime you swipe the TL card, TL/MTC gets a cut. The bottom line is that BART doesn't want to give up the money, so they are foot dragging. And Muni worried about losing money? Not so much.
Whoa, those ticket machines for the M line at SF State and the mall actually work? I can't imagine a time when I've ever seen one that was functional. I just always assumed that they stopped working a long time ago and they just never bothered to get rid of them.
Also, looking at that NextBus screen why is the M so frequently ludicrously overestimated? I've been out waiting at a stop on Randolph and when I check my phone it says the next bus is coming in an hour followed by an hour and twenty minutes. True to their word after waiting for twenty minutes or so the train just never comes and I have to decide that wherever I was planning on going isn't worth waiting on.
The M is truly a dead zone most of the time so I sort of understand. Aside from SF State and Stonestown it doesn't really go anywhere. For reasons I can't possibly imagine the entire strip of Randolph that it passes through has almost nothing on it except for what is possibly the single worst public library I've ever been to in my life. I mean, I know people with larger personal libraries. Even my elementary school library was at least five times bigger! Even better the M doesn't even conveniently go up to Ocean. It's only use is getting out of this shitty neighborhood I wish I'd had the foresight not to move into... when it bothers to actually show up that is.
Whoa, those ticket machines for the M line at SF State and the mall actually work? I can't imagine a time when I've ever seen one that was functional. I just always assumed that they stopped working a long time ago and they just never bothered to get rid of them.
Also, looking at that NextBus screen why is the M so frequently ludicrously overestimated? I've been out waiting at a stop on Randolph and when I check my phone it says the next bus is coming in an hour followed by an hour and twenty minutes. True to their word after waiting for twenty minutes or so the train just never comes and I have to decide that wherever I was planning on going isn't worth waiting on.
The M is truly a dead zone most of the time so I sort of understand. Aside from SF State and Stonestown it doesn't really go anywhere. For reasons I can't possibly imagine the entire strip of Randolph that it passes through has almost nothing on it except for what is possibly the single worst public library I've ever been to in my life. I mean, I know people with larger personal libraries. Even my elementary school library was at least five times bigger! Even better the M doesn't even conveniently go up to Ocean. It's only use is getting out of this shitty neighborhood I wish I'd had the foresight not to move into... when it bothers to actually show up that is.