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Day Around the Bay
The kinds folks over at WhatImSeeing sent us this harrowing image of another Muni meltdown, which happened this morning. Trains were backed up from Embarcadero to Townsend. Possible "police activity at Civic Center" might be to blame. Stay tuned.
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Yep. I was at Civic Center it was lovely. :-P
"Unauthorized persons on the cat-walk between Powell and Civic Center Stations" - quaint, eh?
Yep, I walked to work.
Yep, I walked to work too, after being stuck in the tunnel between castro and church stations for 20 min. I'm sure this evening's commute will be hellish as well, muni always breaks the day before a major holiday.
I was on a train stopped at 9th and Judah for about 30 minutes because "I can't go until this light turns green." When we eventually moved there were four other Ns stacked up behind us. I got on at 19th and Judah and I was one of two people in the car and I was psyched for a quick empty ride downtown before the holiday; by the time we backed everything up (plus the Civic Center mess) the train was a predictable hellride from UCSF on.
My personal belief is that Muni always "breaks" the day before a holiday because a number of Muni employees suffer unexpected "illnesses" on those days. Naturally, there is no provision for replacing the victims of the Muni Flu, so service ends up crapping out.
I've been trying to reconcile my unhappiness with MUNI/BART the last several weeks. However, having just returned from NYC where riding the MTA trains proved really easy, quick, and reliable -- I am just left dumbfounded how MUNI can invariably screw it up if there is even a remote % of room for error.
I know the NY MTA isn't infallible, but can we at least have a service that keeps the riders informed of delays BEFORE letting more people onto a train.
Also, we've seen a LOT of MUNI fare checkers the last several months (no doubt trying to eradicate the gaping chasm in MUNI's deficit) -- but how about getting them stinky ass bums off the train during commute hours. Sure dont see you guys doing jack sh!t about that.
cmon MUNI -- step the 'EFF up!
and here's more on the scene reporting from Loyal Readers...
http://www.njudahchronicles.com/2008/07/wow_todays_commute_just_plain_sucked.html
spectactular FAIL at MUNI.
angrybat, you may be on to somethign there.. tho in my experience muni can pretty much go haywire on any day it feels like it..
i started keeping informal statistics a while ago because i got to thinking, "maybe muni isn't that bad, i just notice that it sucks when it is sucking and not the other times.."
over a 4 week period of 40 rides (i usually ride 10-12 times a week, these are just from commuting times morning and eve) it worked out like this.. these are basically including headway times, from when i get to the stop until i get to the intended stop. note that the numbers skew low slightly because in the mornings a lot of times i will ninja out to the bus right before it comes, where it should technically be a random distribution around 1-10 minute waits it is generally around a 1-3 minute wait. this is only because the nextmuni is actually pretty accurate for the 24 in my area. when i tried doing this with the J i would miss it every time or end up waiting forever anyway. which is why i switched to the 24.
anyway the breakdown went like this:
2 runs - almost perfect run, 39-42 minutes.. (by "perfect" i mean the idealized 35 minute run which is my current muni record to go the 3.8 miles to my house. that has only happened once ever. and is still pretty bad an average of just under 7.6mph)
17 runs - an average "good" run.. waited under 5 minutes at transfers and for the first train, 43-50 minutes
13 runs - got there, but we mysteriously sat without moving for several minutes during one or more of the legs of the trip. 50-65 minutes.
6 runs - mysteriously sat without moving and/or waited like 20+ minutes for vehicle to even show up. 65-75 minutes.
2 runs - reallly bad, like something is totally fubar. 75-85 minutes. (this included a trip where it took almost 25 minutes just to get from 2nd and king to the embarcadero. )
so yah i dunno. during that month around half of the time there was at least some delay, usually on the LRVs. also note that none of these runs were in the super-meltdown style like this morning. luckily those seem pretty rare, only every 4-6 months or so for me where i ended up walking or taking a cab or whatever. i would love if we could see aggregate data about this stuff over the whole routes and system, i suspect that even if they collect that information the people who run stuff over there would still have trouble actually improving it.. trains still get stacked up back to back all the time which causes a lot of the issues.