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Long Wait; Tight Squeeze
This photo was taken last Wednesday at Fulton and Masonic around 7pm. You can't possibly imagine how packed this bus was -- people stepping on each other, on each others' laps, holding the ceiling-mounted LED display because there was nowhere else to get a grip, standing in both stairwells, and even sitting on the fare box.
Why was everyone so eager to get on this particular bus? Because they'd been waiting about an hour, and who knows how long they'd have to wait if they didn't take a deep breath and cram onto driver 0932's bus.
Well, actually, they'd only have to wait about 3 minutes. Because 0932 is one of those buncher-uppers you always see -- this particular evening, he was habitually running only a few minutes ahead of the next bus.
But he didn't mention that to the people on the bus -- "hey, there's an empty bus 3 minutes behind me" -- even when an elderly lady limped onto the front step, assisted by a caretaker, and braced herself there on the stairs for the bumpy ride. This would have been an excellent opportunity for him to say, "wait, this isn't safe; you can get on the empty bus behind me and actually sit in a seat."
We know that he was aware of the empty vehicle -- he could see it when he turned around at the end of his route, because that's where we boarded this bus -- but no. Not only did he make everyone wait for an hour, but then he let them pack onto some kind of perverted transit orgy. All aboard the Muni sardine can!
After the jump: in case you care, the text of the complaint that we sent to Muni.
Not content to rest on our filthy laurels, we sent the following complaint to Muni, where it will be no doubt promptly acted upon:
The bunching on route 43 is always a problem, but it was particularly bad on the evening of Wednesday, October 10, 2007. I waited for an hour at Presidio and Letterman -- only a few stops from the end of the route -- and watched five buses pass in the other direction, all within a 15-minute span.My wait started at about 5:50. Here are the buses that passed in the other direction:
6:15 - Bus 8016 on run 668
6:20 - Bus 8338 on run 763
6:22 - Bus 8324 on run 686
6:24 - Bus 8185 on run 780
6:30 - Bus 8369 on run 704Finally, at about 6:45, bus 8016 on run 799, driven by 0932, arrived to pick us up. (Although his display still read 668 when he picked us up, the driver stopped midway through the route to change it to 799.)
Because the people at each stop had been waiting for up to an hour, they all attempted to cram onto this bus when it arrived. This led to the worst overcrowding I've ever seen -- it was so crowded, people were standing in both stairwells as the bus drove. At one point, passengers could not even reach the farebox when they boarded.
At no point did the driver decline to accept any more passengers. He kept allowing them to board.
At Fulton and Masonic, he allowed an elderly lady to climb onto the front step, assisted by a caretaker. She couldn't move any further onto the bus, and would have ridden the bus while standing in the stairwell, if she had not then noticed that there was a second 43 immediately behind this one.
The worst part of this is that there was another bus just a few minutes behind them. There was no reason he had to let a hazardous number of people onto the bus -- he could easily have told them to wait just a few minutes for the next bus. This second bus caught up with him at Fulton and Masonic, where I disembarked. I assume they traveled together for the remainder of the route.
So to sum up, there are multiple separate issues here:
- Five buses all bunched together
- An hourlong wait
- Driver 0932 allowing hazardous overcrowdingIt would be difficult to imagine a worse Muni experience than this.
That last line isn't true, of course -- as we've seen, Muni has started putting up posters of far worse experiences.