Hey, did you know that the San Francisco County Transportation Authority is thinking about speeding up transit on Van Ness by putting in dedicated bus boulevards? BUT WAIT DON'T CLICK ON THAT LINK IT MIGHT CRASH YOUR BROWSER! The SFCTA, in their wisdom, has placed two JPEGs on their page about the proposed Van Ness corridor; one is a picture of how the dedicated lanes might look (pretty), and the other is a mock-up of how the MUNI map might be changed (acceptably), and each image is a bone-crushing TWO MEGS. The map alone is 6344 by 4843 pixels -- several orders of magnitude greater than an average monitor is capable of displaying -- and was more than enough to completely crash our modest laptop. Great work, SFCTA.

Seriously, though, it really is great work. Imagine what would happen if MUNI -- which is a separate entity from the board-of-supes-controlled SFCTA -- adopted this supersize-everything policy. Bus shelters spanning entire city blocks! Maps so large, they have their own maps! Tokens the size of sewer rats, and Andre the Giant behind the wheel! Oh sure, they called us crazy back when we were throwing up browser-crashing JPEGs; sure, they laughed. BUT WHO'S LAUGHING NOW?! MWAH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!

...And with that, MUNI scurried off in a puff of diesel exhaust, twirling its articulated handlebar moustache, to tie a damsel to the J line tracks, where she will be run over after a half-hour to 45-minute wait.

UPDATE! Okay, we just had a pleasant chat with Rachel at the SFCTA, and she said she'd check on the JPEGs, and now it appears they're not longer a problem ... because they've simply disappeared. The Transit Authority has WAYS of dealing with disobedient graphics! Apparantly they've been replaced with, urrrrgh, PDFs. Anyway, we're following the whole Van-Ness-Bus-Lane thingy pretty closely, so we'll be sure to bring you more relevant details as soon as they emerge.

UPDATE UPDATE! Our jerky complaining appears to have resulted in the creation of some much-improved images. Problem solved! OMG we're like totally John Stossel right now! Only without the moustache from 1974.