June 17, 2008
Muni Driver May Have Felt the Need, the Need for Speed
Last Saturday's T-Third meets N-Judah collision might be, according to to investigators, might have been the result of a speeding Muni driver and/or someone chatting on their cell phone. KCBS reports:
Investigators say one of the MUNI rail cars involved in a crash Saturday afternoon was speeding and the driver may have been talking on his cell phone. (...) MUNI says drivers are not allowed to talk on the phone while operating a vehicle. Investigators are trying to obtain the operator's cell phone records.
What? Muni drivers are ALWAYS on their mobile communication devices. And they're not supposed to be? We are stunned. Anyway, the car was allegedly "going 17 miles per hour in a 3 mph zone" right before the crash. Jesus.
If you recall, last week's harrowing Muni train crash over on King Street near AT&T landed 12 people in the hospital, all of them with non-life threatening injuries. The drivers of the trains have been relieved of their driving duties as the investigation continues.
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17mph in a 3mph...ARE YOU JOKING! AGH! Nearly 6 times the limit! Equivalent to about 150mph in a 25mph zone on the road. JAIL TIME PLEASE! I would wayyy rather have tax dollars spent locking up this dumbass as opposed to the non-violent first-time drug offender.
Christ, muni drivers are so dangerously fucking stupid.
I wonder if this is the same driver that about 25 minutes ago nearly threw everyone in the rear car of the N going inbound all the way across the train because he took the corner so damned fast - that was some serious Gs we were enduring. I thought the train was gonna tip over.
100 bucks says he gets promoted
fucking union scum!
worse than the homeless!
;)
actually, that zone is only 3MPH during games, so the ballpark shuttles have time to turn around. this is actually bull, man, you shouldn't be operating a heavy shoddy train which has shoddy brakes over 3MPH when the person knows there's a train in front of it.
Maybe the cell phone law should be extended to Muni drivers.
Holy crap! Muni really said this? Their point guard PR person would have just made a bullshit stirred story and say it is mechanical or a passenger's fault.
Shoddy brakes, are you kidding? These trains are Ferraris!
channel 2 news just showed the video. nobody actually witnessed the driver on his phone during the crash. he has it out afterwords to possibly call for help. not clear.
his phone records will either be his salvation or jail sentence.
they also quoted state law and muni rules that make it illegal for any driver to use their phone while driving.
watch the union block any subpoena of his phone records.
travin: most LRV operators pull that shit on the L. The speed at which these operators take the turns onto/off of 15th Ave are absurd. I had to explain to some cute Irish tourists that they had better hold on, lest they be thrown to the ground. I'm sure they're not helping the life expectancy of these trains either.
Words fail me.
P.S. The video is viewable on SFGate:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c/a/2008/06/17/BA9711ALKA.DTL&o=0
http://www.examiner.com/a-1444995~Answers_delayed_in_Muni_accident.html
Eight people are still in the hospital over this. dfsjkdsjlsdldfs.
Someone ought to be fired.
@zippy: I hear ya but in the 35+ years I've been riding muni/public transit, including other cities, I've never experienced anything like this.
The driving skills of a lot of drivers are truly mortifying. Don't even get me started on the bus drivers.
A 3mph speed limit? That should be absolutely criminal. No serious transit system should ever have a 3mph speed limit. This is insulting the riders. Why is it that a mass transit system was ever allowed to be engineered with a 3mph speed limit? What are they thinking?
Look we're talking about building a high speed train in california that will travel at sustained speeds of 220mph. Why can't muni design their rail to not crawl? 3mph? Pedestrians are walking faster then that!
Mass transit vehicles should never have to stop at a stop light or stop sign, always have its own right of way, and never be forced to travel at 3mph.
About the driver slamming into the car in front of him; Why was the far in front of him stopped? If the driver in front of him wasn't such a slow poke this accident could have been avoided! (sarcasm)
-Ziggy
travin: ride the L, enjoy the 90 degree turns where the speed limit is the recommended speed.
boyziggy: try one of those 90 degree turns with your car at 30mph. it's fun.
What we need are some aerial trams. That'd be fun. If Portland can do it, so can we.
The 3MPH rule is only supposed to be during the ballgames. Wasn't there a game that day?
I can see the line of ambulance chasing lawyers outside the hospital from space. I'll reserve judgment until it is determined that the eight people in the hospital are there because of their injuries and not because Muni hasn't offered them enough money.
Boy Ziggy is totally right.
BTW the driver will be saved by the union
Looking at the video I can just imagine the "whiplash" and "aches and pains" claims.
No excuse for the accident though. But the city should be careful not to overpay.
Ziggy is right. 3 mph is ridiculous. IMO 17 mph is ridiculous too. It takes nearly 15 minutes to get from ATT park to 4th and King the way the trains are limited and the lights are timed for cars.
A train that moves hundreds of people should never be forced to sit at a red light waiting for cars with only one passenger in them.
The T driver was probably as pissed as his passengers at sitting through 3 red light cycles at 4th and king and he had the nerve to get up to 17 mph. The gall! Now the jackass should have stopped before ramming the N, but come on. How many of you have been stuck behind a slow walker on the sidewalk? Its infuriating.
The way everyone gets pissed at muni for every accident we will soon have it regulated so that we will get to work faster paying a fat girl to give us a piggy back in high heels. There is a lot of traffic in the city -- cars, bikes, peds, trains and buses. There are going to be accidents. But let's let the buses and trains go faster and the rest of us get smarter in watching out for them.
muni getting the right of way is one of the most logical comments i've ever seen on this blog. good luck getting that past the fixies and peds and cars that all think they deserve the right of way, 24x7, or worse yet, to be treated as equal to a train.
Just wait until Muni extends the "F" line on that route, mixing Metros and historic streetcars will get ugly when there's already a train backup on ballgame days.
Lawyers cannot solicit clients while they are in the hospital recovering from an accident. To do so is to risk disbarrment.
And these lawyers wouldn't have jobs if MUNI didn't fuck up on such a continual basis. Don't want lawsuits? Don't hire drugged out, cellphone yammering drivers who maim/kill/injure people. Seems pretty easy to me.
> Shoddy brakes, are you kidding? These trains are Ferraris!
No shit, they were built in Italy, what did you expect?
> Just wait until Muni extends the "F" line on that route, mixing Metros and historic streetcars will get ugly when there's already a train backup on ballgame days.
Yep, the eventually the E'll be discontinued because they'll begin to run out of old streetcars.
> BTW the driver will be saved by the union
I don't think so, with something like this. Maybe they would, but since their contract expires June 30th, expect mass sickouts.
Those trains are crap anyway. Whose idea was to purchase the Boeing and then the Bredas?
Other light rail train manufacturers make better ones than the heavy, noisy, and shotty wiring that Muni invested in.
Did you know that Muni can't operate more than 2 cars because the wires are so f-ed that it may disconnect while the train is in motion? I also miss the days when they ran 4-car trains, but they had to buy train cars that are LONGER...
Seriously, they aren't allowed to talk on their phones? I see it daily.
it's against the law for a muni driver to use his cellphone while operating the vehicle. call them on it. tell them to get off the phone or you will report them.
What we really need is a city-wide, fully functional subway system. Will it be amazingly, overpoweringly expensive? Almost certainly. Will it actually serve people who live here unlike the damned central subway project? Yeah.
The city is very dense with significant problems in street design and a lack of street space to devote to much else. This is exactly the sort of situation underground transit is designed to deal with.
Buses should be relegated to last-mile solutions for local-only transit.
This would reduce accidents, increase throughput, decrease street traffic, allow increased street space for bike lanes, and let you actually get across town in less than and hour and a half and two buses. Or, y'know, just taking BART for 15 minutes... assuming you're willing to pay more and are in an area served by BART.
A subway system could be further optimized and costs reduced by increasing the level of automation since the trains would not need to interact with any other traffic. This, of course, won't happen even though it's a good idea, because of the unions. They are determined to hold onto high-paying, low-accountability jobs even if it's to the detriment of everyone who lives in the city and the functioning of the transit system.
Because this is a sensible idea that has been adopted by every other congested, dense urban area it will never, ever happen here. The most we can hope for are the current systems that either piggyback on what someone else was willing to build or what we already had lying around unused. Unless tourism is involved. Because, y'know, it's so hard to walk a few blocks from the Moscone Center to Union Square.
It's a good point that the 3mph rule is a real problem. The incredibly slow service through that area is horrible. Working signal pre-empts would make a big difference .. but the operators still need to look where they're going!
when the t first started running, i read on one of these bloggy type sites (maybe here?) that they have signal pre-empts for that interesection at 4th & king but they were never activiated due to concerns about ... traffic congestion.
in fact it looks like the signals are very fancy:
4d traffic
i always thought the 3mph limit during games along that part of the route was because of the unpredictable nature of large crowds of drunk folks.
nonetheless, even when there is not a game it's pretty slow through there due to waiting for traffic. my record is 31 minutes from at&t park to embarcadero station.