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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.
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all i've got to say is:
9 san bruno
that bus is beyond packed. i used to work on stockton and you wouldn't believe the breakdown of humanity i saw when the pink-bags see that bus coming. never mind that there were already people sitting on people sitting on people on that bus, they made room, some how, some way.
There's always another bus.
That's the very nature of buses.
How many times have you seen people get off when the drive does announce the existence of the empty bus just behind him?
Maybe this driver knows that he's dealing with a bus riding population that is perpetually in a hurry, but always demands the bus waits for them.
I think the point Matt is making is that allowing every last piggie to cram onto the lead bus is what causes the clumping, and the drivers are aware of that.
The 43 is a mess after 6pm. All the buses that get to the end of the route in the marina go off shift and back to the garage and those that turn around seem to be haphazard at best.
NextBus is pretty unreliable about telling you what's happening as well. I sat at work for 45 minutes on friday evening waiting for nextbus to tell me when to go stand in the rain. However a couple of 43s seemed to materialize on the nextbus map halfway up Presidio Ave. Do they only turn the transponder on when they're two miles into their run?
Yes, sometimes the transponders are disabled at the start of a run. Many drivers switch off the entire bus while they're taking their breaks, and it takes the transponders a few minutes to reconnect to the system when they're rebooted.
This could be solved by asking the drivers to boot up the buses five minutes before they intend to leave. Like how, when it's cold, you start warming up your the car five minutes before leaving for work. But that would require forethought.
28 on Sunday... everyone trying to get to Hardly Strictly Bluegrass... MUNI diverting buses for the niner's game. Yum. No 29s were running either apparently. MUNI policy is that a bus should never be at more than 85% of capacity... but crush loaded buses are obviously quite common on some routes (ahh the 28 when all of the tweens get out of school).
I'd worry a lot less about crush loading than I would about the other problems. Make MUNI reliable, and bam... people won't freak out about missing the bus because the next one will be less than an hour away.
I sure hope you're not warming your car up for five minutes before you drive, you're wasting gas. Driving it gently will warm it up faster, and use less gasoline. If you really do need instant heat, get an engine block heater.
P.S. Hope ya'll will show up to some of the Transit Effectiveness Project meetings and voice your concerns:
http://www.njudahchronicles.com/2007/10/give_a_dose_of_reality_to_the.html
What's the point of the yellow lines in the public transit vehicles again?
The bus driver should have enforced safety rules, even if it meant an old lady waiting a little longer for another bus.
It is disturbing that the bus driver didn't announce another bus was just 3 minutes behind .... it would've been better to let folks off the bus but refuse to pick up anyone new (that's happened to us all, and it makes sense when the bus is already beyond capacity). The fact that the bus driver didn't make an announcement speaks to the culture at MUNI - the flavor that I get from the culture is that being nice is not a necessity ... and sometimes, proven by slamming their breaks CONSTANTLY when their bus is packed, these guys get off on hurting people in my opinion or at least don't have a bit of conscientiousness about them (probably more likely).
Okay, the "warming your car up" thing is a holdover from when I lived in New England, and you couldn't move until the windshield had heated up enough to scrape the ice off.
I understand that it can be no picnic driving for Muni. People are crazy. But I was absolutely bowled over when I visited a friend in Seattle and took the bus around. Drivers were incredibly friendly, polite, and even *smiled*.
I have this problem repeatedly in the AM on the 21 Hayes going downtown. between 7:30AM and 9AM, it fills up by the time we get to Divis, yet the driver keeps stopping to let people on, even encouraging them not to pay and smush in via the back door. People stand in the stairwells, in the extra space between the two sets of seats facing each other, and many times "hugging" those close to them so they don't fall over.
The most distressing part, besides trying to get off the bus when you're crammed in like sardines and the driver doesn't stop long enough to let everyone who needs to get off, is that when the driver finally does stop cramming people in, he/she then doesn't stop at all east of Fillmore until Civic Center, forcing those in the low income areas to wait a long, long, long time just for a less crowded bus.
Solution: Run more buses. Actually charge people their fair (fare) share. And don't let my tax dollars encourage some guy to use me and my posterior as a substitute for a metal handle bar.
Looks like a fairly typical 28 bus after the 2 previous buses failed to show. Very common to have riders in both stairwells pressed against the doors on the 28. Happens all the time.
Slamming on the brakes? Eh. Consider an average adult weighing 150lbs. Add ten extra people. Bam, you're at 3/4 of a ton. Can you say brake fade? Some of the drivers are assholes, sure. Some of them probably get off on watching people suffer. But if the brakes on the buses are anywhere near as bad and unpredictable as they are on the LRVs, yeah... you're not going to get a smooth stop every time. Also consider that the braking system on a bus is going to be quite a bit more complicated than it is on a bike or car (where you're only contending with hydraulically controlled friction brakes that are much easier to control than the air powered stuff on the buses). I'll go with maintenance issue over driver issue on this one.
Not announcing the next bus? If the communication system is a bad as Nat Ford and Rachel Green would have you believe...
Rahir - couldn't agree more about the 21 Hayes.
Have lived on 21 route for 4 years. Buses are intermittent (had to wait 40 mins for one this morning - from 8:05-8:45am) and invariably packed. Even 5 blocks west of Divis.
This route needs to increase the frequency of buses during peak times.
Attention all commenting transit wankstarz:
For those of you who are unfamiliar with using "The google," I've assembled the following specifics about the upcoming TEP meetings:
"Transit Effectiveness Project Community Meetings
Excelsior District
Saturday, October 20 (morning)
10:00 am to 12:30 pm
Monroe Elementary School - Cafeteria
260 Madrid St. at Excelsior Ave. (Enter on Madrid)
The nearest Muni bus lines are
14, 29, 49 and 52.
Mission District
Saturday, October 20 (afternoon)
3:00 pm to 5:30 pm
St. Peter’s Catholic Church - Lower Hall
Alabama St. at 24th St. (Enter on Alabama)
The nearest Muni bus lines are
9, 27 and 48.
Inner Sunset
Monday, October 22
6:00 pm to 8:30 pm
County Fair Building (Hall of Flowers)
- Recreation Room
9th Ave. at Lincoln Way (near entrance to San Francisco Botanical Gardens). The nearest Muni lines are N-Judah, 6, 43, 44, 66 and 71.
Civic Center
Tuesday, October 23
6:00 pm to 8:30 pm
Bill Graham Civic Auditorium
99 Grove St. at Polk St.
The nearest BART and Muni
station is Civic Center. The
nearest Muni bus lines are 9,
19, 21 and 49.
For more information, e-mail the TEP at info@sftep.com or call (415) 701-4599. TTY users may call (415) 701-2323. Spanish and Chinese speakers may call (415) 226-1313."
- from www.sftep.com
Be there, be square... or STFU.
I remember riding the 43 during the "Muni Meltdown." It got so bad that I waited over an hour to see a packed bus and a moronic driver pointing towards the bus behind it, which was the 31 express.
Another time, a driver on that line intentionally skipped our pickup point, and the bus was empty.
I'm going to make this bumper sticker online and stick this to my car:
San Francisco Muni SUCKS
That's why I drive my car