Your place to share stories on and off the bus.
This is a photo of a woman on a hoverboard buying BART tickets. Happy Friday!
Love these public transporation moments? Come to Muni Diaries Live on Apr. 16 at the Elbo Room to hear our best stories live! Tickets.
For whatever reason, and despite the choreographed nature of it, we like when celebrities and politicians (same same?) do the things us normal folks do.
Case in point: That one time in 1972 when President Richard Nixon (a former California senator, you’ll remember) rode the spiffy, shiny, new BART. Muni Diaries Live veteran Peter Hartlaub wrote about Nixon’s visit to the Bay Area recently for the SF Chronicle:
Photos and words from The Chronicle archive show the president, often with his eyes wide and mouth agape, in wonder at all the tech surrounding him.
“You know, it does look like NASA,” said Nixon, as he peered at the electrified route displays in the BART control room.
Nixon arrived in the Bay Area with a surprise $38.1 million in bonus funding for BART, then hopped on a train at San Leandro Station, taking a nine-minute trip to Lake Merritt for a tour of the BART control center.
Taking a break from BART’s woes of late, some insiders recently got a first taste of the trains set to go online beginning this fall. I found this video on Muni Diaries Live veteran Kelly Beardsley‘s Facebook. I thought you might want to see it, too.
h/t Mark Ambus
Have you ever wished that you said exactly what’s on your mind at work?
During last week’s BART meltdown, the man running the BART Twitter account gained national attention by tweeting some honest truth bombs about transit. This week on Popular Mechanics, Taylor Huckaby, the spokesperson tweeting that day (who has our standing invitation to tater tots and whiskey at Bender’s forever), wrote about what was going through his mind that night:
Somewhere along the way, I replied to a frustrated passenger with what I thought was a fairly standard response, one we had used elsewhere: BART was built to transport far fewer people, much of the system has reached the end of its useful life, and this is the reality we face.
The response went viral, as sites like Gizmodo marveled at a government agency being frank and honest on social media and posted several of my replies to angry riders. Now, I’m hoping this episode sparks a much-needed national conversation about the stark reality of America’s deteriorated railways, roads, bridges, airports, sewer systems and electrical grid. This shouldn’t be a blame game. This is about facing deficiencies, having a frank conversation about them, and making our government better. There’s no purer distillation of democracy’s mission than this, but even so, it has proven tremendously difficult to articulate how to fix mass transit in America.
Recent woes with, um, having BART’s trains actually function aside, we come to you with a very sincere inquiry:
WOULD YOU RIDE BART BAREFOOTEDLY*?
Well, wouldja?
Photo by Isabel
* not an actual word, but there you go
There’s a right way and a wrong way to run the social media account of a public entity. During this week’s BART disruptions, the agency’s Twitter account engaged in so much “the right way of doing things.” Gizmodo has the story:
“Last night, the person in charge of the official San Francisco BART Twitter account lost it. In 57 tweets, the account espoused truth and honesty, and pretty much admitted what everyone in the Bay Area already knows: the crumbling institution kinda sucks.”
We can sympathize! Here at @munidiaries and @bartdiaries, we probably see almost as many hateful public transit tweets as the poor soul who ran BART’s Twitter feed this week. Fortunately our only job here, as four riders blogging away in our living rooms, is to pick out the funniest rants and present them to you! The media found the guy who was running BART’s Twitter feed that night: Taylor Huckaby of @iwriterealgood.
More from Wire.com:
Thankfully for Huckaby, BART’s higher-ups approved of the rogue policy change. His boss commended him for “single-handedly” turning the tide of “pretty much abuse” into an actual conversation. “It was exciting to be able to start a conversation about infrastructure,” Huckaby says, “because infrastructure is just not sexy—unless something is broken or brand new.”
Even The New York Times is on it. They talked to Huckaby about his approach to social media for BART:
His philosophical approach to social media runs counter to that of most government agencies, which he said use Twitter as a bullhorn.
“With the political climate, there’s a lot of focus right now on America’s crumbling infrastructure — why are our tax dollars not getting us anything; where’s our return on investment?” he said, explaining why he thought it was important for government to be responsive online.
Here are a few of the tweets from that evening:
@lisabari To illustrate this point – the number of people who exit at 19th street in Oakland has doubled in less than a decade.
— SFBART (@SFBART) March 17, 2016
Like @iamjohnoliver has said on @lastweektonight, infrastructure isn't sexy – but without it, no one moves. #ThisIsOurReality
— SFBART (@SFBART) March 17, 2016
@shakatron BART was built to transport far fewer people, and much of our system has reached the end of its useful life. This is our reality.
— SFBART (@SFBART) March 17, 2016
@tquad64 Planners in 1996 had no way of predicting the tech boom – track redundancy, new tunnels & transbay tubes are decades-long projects.
— SFBART (@SFBART) March 17, 2016
People in other parts of the U.S. took notice and applauded BART’s openness and honesty through the crisis:
I actually wish more government agencies were this honest about their problems and the tradeoffs of solutions: https://t.co/qtcAGkzBGI
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) March 17, 2016
This one, from the Metro LA account, was especially awesome in its GIF-y solidarity:
@SFBART pic.twitter.com/9xSwytfty4
— Metro (@metrolosangeles) March 17, 2016
Yes, we indeed need more openness and candid communication from public transit agencies. Hear that, @SFMTA_Muni?