Muni Driver Attacked

a fire extinguisher? nice.

i carry a hammer in my backpack for protection but a fire extinguisher, well, that is just on some next level shit.

Hardly shocking, though, given some of the verbal abuse I have heard drivers heap on the riders. Racist "jokes" by drivers about patrons that look Mexican to the faces of the customers. Yelling at old people for being "too slow" to sit down because the driver was in a hurry (both of those incidents happened at exactly the same time). The old guy responded with class: "I guess I'm not fast as I used to be when I was in the service." And the recent story of someone moving away from the curb to not get hit and the driver using the PA system on the bus to tell them their body language sucked if they wanted that bus to stop for them.

You can stick all the signs up you want about it being a felony to assault a MUNI driver, but when the drivers are verbally abusive on a consistent and regular basis and the MUNI management is effectively impotent to discipline the drivers in any way, then you are certain to end up with drivers believing they can act however they want without repercussions. Of course, the drives forget that the customers are human too and are subject to irrational behavior. If you provoke enough people, one of them is going to bite.

If you want to read a GREAT story about how MUNI management deals with discipline in the worst ways possible, head over to the N Judah Chroniles http://www.njudahchronicles.com/ and read the entry for August 2, 2008. Instead of disciplining drivers that might use the switchbacks to make ad hoc adjustments to a route, they welded the switchbacks closed and took the track irons off the trains so that drivers themselves can't perform directional switches. Result: delayed and interrupted service on the light rail lines where this has happened (the N Judah - if you ride the N, you've noticed exactly what's being described here increasing in frequency as of late). That's the solution to disciplining drivers, to remove one of the possible items you might need to discipline them for and to make the entire ridership suffer?

It's no wonder drivers are the targets, also, because they are the public face of MUNI. They are the human beings we SEE and HEAR that represent MUNI, and when service drops to unfathomably shitty levels as it has done over the last few years, they are going to get the brunt of public displeasure. It's not like there is any way for us as riders to affect change or have a voice with MUNI otherwise. I am not sure what the administration of MUNI is thinking. They have turned the entire system into a system of remediation of fuck ups instead of transforming the system to evolve with the city as it changes.

amen, smallerdemon.