The Coming N-Judah Express Bus
Photo by Whole Wheat Toast
According to SF Appeal:
Morning peak express buses will make 11 stops between 48th Avenue and 19th Avenue along Judah Street before beelining to Bush and Montgomery streets.
Similarly, evening express service will begin at Sutter and Sansome streets and will run express to 19th Avenue and Judah Street before making 11 local stops.
So, Outer Sunset Muni riders, we wanna know: What you think about this new service? It’s set to begin on June 13. Yea or nay?
Completely stupid. For $1.8 million, they could have fixed the existing route (removed stops, added a signal at Church and Duboce, etc. etc.) but instead they decided to confuse the hell out of passengers by adding a weird new line that overlaps heavily with an existing one.
This sounds like good news, both for folks who live in the Outer Sunset and those of us N-riders who live closer to downtown. Waiting for the morning N train at Duboce Park (or worse, Duboce and Church) is a total game of chance. The trains usually arrive completely over-crowded, and few if any passengers are able to board. Hopefully the express bus will divert some of that ridership and make a better commute for everyone. Fingers crossed…
Seems like a band-aid solution to me. But as I’m not a regular N rider these days, I probably have no right to complain…
Agree with Mr Eric – they could have removed stops, added cars (go up to 4 cars during rush hour), made signal repairs, etc. Seems like that might have worked better. And it still won’t do much for folks living closer than 19th Ave, except maybe make it a little less crowded, but really by how much? There are some good neighborhoods off the N, but I won’t live in them, specifically because of how much I’ve heard the N provides nothing but a horrendous commute.
I agree that they should’ve used the money to improve the existing N line.
I guess they were testing this at Bay to Breakers? I tweeted you this a few days ago, but they were charging $10 to ride this thing. We were completely confused between the Bay To Breakers shuttles, the N express bus for $10, and when a regular streetcar would show up. The really really bad thing about this is because of the N express bus, they reduced the number of N streetcars – my Routesy showed them coming in 30 minute increments! Anyway, I sure how the $10 charge and the less streetcars won’t be the case when they roll this out.
It’ll be kinda cool to have a direct bus to Haight Street though..
Don’t expect anyone to take it. This will be just like the 143 and 145 express buses in the TTC. Both were built almost parallel to an unreliable streetcar service and no one uses them, choosing to use the streetcar.
many days Muni is short 4-8 LRVs (too many breakdowns). So this is NOT additional service–it is wasting money on fresh paint for the oldest buses in the fleet (hand me downs from AC Transit) which barely make up for the missing trains.
Money issue; will these all be at OT? As others have said, getting rid of 4 way stops, putting in train priority traffic li8ghts would be a far better investment.
When the segment from Embarcadero to CalTrain was built signal preempts were installed BUT not turned on WTF?
And does anyone care to bet how many MORE bogus turnbacjs will happen?
I presume the express bus will not be an accordian bus, but the same size as the 71. Great. Imagine how crowded this bus will get. Does this mean the regularly scheduled N LRVs will be reduced?