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We were riding the M line yesterday, thumbing through the Guardian's 41st anniversary special, when G.W. Schultz's lead for the his anti-Muni-privatization article caught our eye:
After we finished bashing our heads against the windows and swearing, we read on:
There's a money room in the basement of 1 South Van Ness, where the Municipal Transportation Agency, which operates Muni, is headquartered. Workers literally count by hand bags of cash and coins taken in as fares from passengers throughout the day.
When Muni recently needed to pull some of those unionized bean counters away from the money room to staff kiosks around the city where transit passes are sold, its managers hoped to replace them with workers from a private contracting outfit.Surely someone, somewhere has come up with a better way to count large amounts of change and small bills, haven't they? Nah. If someone had invented something that space-age and wonderful, Muni would have purchased it long ago, freeing up those employees to man those empty kiosks and obviating the need for contractors! Everybody would win! Sadly, that technology is only the stuff of dreams.
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If there Muni WAS a private entity, and therefore dependent on efficiency for its survival, of course they's be spending their money on wiser investments than a fleet of old-timey Scriveners.
But no -- they're permanently attached to a government tit, so they can just go on sucking and sucking and sucking.
Privatize it. Privatize it all and privatize it now.
A for-profit entity simply has nowhere to go but up.
Keep in mind that many of Muni's problems are legacies from when all city transportation was private - duplicated bus lines, etc.
I'm not for privatization - public transportation is just that, and as far as I know there are no cities with functioning private mass-transit systems in the world (If I'm wrong, please correct me). It would be nice, however, if Muni had some kind of accountability. How about this - do something akin to item #12 on the Evil Overlord List. Any stupidities that a five-year-old child can spot get axed. That might actually improve things.
What possible good could privitization do without competition, except just create another 5 or 10 layers of bureaucracy for the unions and politicos to corrupt?
I can't imagine a contact agreement between the City and a private transit agency that would not include a "lifetime secure jobs for goldbrickers and incompetents" provision or whetaver it is now that's part of the problem.
You want to see transit get really fun? Award contracts to TWO competing transit agencies. Imagine two 38-Gearies, one red, one blue, careening down the street, trying to see who can make it downtown the fastest while running over the fewest number of pedestrians!
Privatize? Sure - adding "make a profit" to the list of things MUNI is responsible for will fix everything, just like magic!
If you love how Halliburton, Comcast, AT&T and other private monopolies do business, you'll love a transit system that has no obligation to serve the public, just make money.
The first thing to do? Most of the routes, whether they're used or not. They'd simply keep a few lines and abandon most of the city.
We had a private system, actually several. Fun fact: during WWII, they cut service and drove up rates, despite that whole world war thing. When they were asked to stop the fare hikes and service cuts, they said "FU, we only serve our stockholders, not the public."
Look it up. If you accept a bad MUNI you get a bad MUNI. If you accept a stupid government, you get what you deserve. At least MUNI is obligated to serve the public. A private system can tell you to go to hell, and the fact is , a private monopoly is no better than any goverment bureaucracy.
I just want MUNI to break their lines into to types of Buses:
Free Buses that stop at every stop.
$5.00 Express Buses with a coffee bar, shoeshine, WIFI and a massage booth.
Re counting the money:
Hire a group of nuns- the same ones that count the coins in the church poorboxes.
Cheap labor from documented workers. They won't steal because God will send them to hell if they do.
Do "The Sisters" take a vow of poverty?
Private operation of the whole system would probably not do much. Many systems have contracted out operations without great improvements.
Things like coin counting could probably be better handled by a contractor - but then again, if Muni and MTC ever get Translink done, our great grandchildren won't have to worry about this.
Public transit systems are sure-fire money losers, so privatization is probably not a great soluton. But aj is right, contracting out certain operations makes a lot of sense.
Or, they could just dump all that change in the Coinstar at any supermarket and get a Starbucks gift card.