Your place to share stories on and off the bus.
Just received this via email from Kiley McEvoy:
Saw this on my way home at about 5:55 PM today
Sorry I don’t have any other info, but the pics pretty much tell the story.
And this tweet from @ewindram fills in some clues:
I feel terrible for the elderly driver who accidently turned onto the muni tracks at san jose/mission đ
If you saw this, please comment, and if you’ve got pics or videos, email or otherwise send it in!
My colleague Jeff and I were finishing up our drinks at 83 Proof around Midnight, last Thursday night-Friday morning â big shout out to Hazel and Mark, btw â after a hectic night of editinâ, paginatinâ and copyeditinâ for the SF Examiner. While plotting our next move, Jeff suggested we go to the Toronado since we were going to the Lucky 13 â our regular Thursday night watering hole â the following night to drink with Muni Diariesâ own Jeff Hunt and Tara Ramroop, who are celebrating their recent engagement (Like it hasnât been mentioned on Muni Diaries a hundred times already, but, I digress). So I says, âSince you want to go to the Toronado, I suggest we take the 6-Parnassus, cause itâll drop us off right out front.â After some haggling and debate over the length of time the 6 will take versus the underground, Jeff acquiesced to my suggestion, and what a great decision that turned out to be.
With âtrustyâ nextbus on my cell phone, I saw that we had 5 minutes to catch one at Market and Battery streets. Five minutes turned into about 6 or 7, but the bus did come (thankfully) and we got on. I sat in the seat on the driverâs side that has that extra leg room, just behind the first row that faces forward. Jeff sat on the seat behind me, and at this time, we were the only passengers on the bus. As we head down Market, stop to stop, the usual mish-mash of folks slowly amble on, from the young man with the drum sticks and faux-hawk, to the late-shift restaurant workers getting off work, to the quiet, silent types with their headphones and glasses, to the crackhead who had a hard time getting his fare together who then sat behind the driver not far from the young man with drum sticks and proceeded to sing and talk to himself trying to make eye contact with everyone in the front of the bus. This caused young man with drum sticks and faux-hawk to move to the back of the bus, opposite the driverâs side, to the seats that face each other. He sat in the row facing the front of the bus. A couple stops later, wanna be alpha-male and overall-slick mother fucker douche bag gets on the bus.
Everything was going more or less as we had planned. We had a short wait at 20th and Mission, nothing out of the ordinary. Our inbound 49 arrived, and with ample seating. We plopped down on the back row, Tara and I, sitting on and surrounded by so much tagging, I remarked that it was so hideous, it almost came back to beautiful (the so-called Saturn effect). Sadly, I didn’t take a photo.
All the windows were closed, which didn’t sit well with my needs as an oxygen-consuming being. I cracked the one nearest me a subtle 1.5 inches. All was well.
(An odd interlude, if I may â and because I don’t feel like writing it out, I point you to this Muni Diaries Twitter update.)
It was the ride back to the Mission, again on the 49, that has me writing this diary on an otherwise lovely, dreary Sunday morning.
Photo by Troy Holden
For the first time in memory there were fare inspectors at the O’Farrell and Van Ness (38 outbound) stop last night. I applaud this attempt. Again, this is the first time I recall ever seeing inspectors there and I have been taking the bus home from work (where I get on at O’Farrell and Van Ness) for nearly 8 years. But there was not just one inspector, or two…there were four (4) inspectors. I was so overwhelmed at the show of force I asked one of them if they were all ‘working’. Yes, they were all working, as I witnessed when the bus approached. Does it really take four inspectors to make sure everybody pays? I would think one would do the trick. Heck, you don’t need inspectors if the bus drivers did their job and not allow people to enter the back of the bus. I just returned from Vancouver where I saw a bus driver physically get up and walk to the back of the bus to boot somebody off for entering through the back and not paying.
With Muni’s budget woes there is a need to make better use of the money and services already there. Collecting every fare is one step. Cutting back on unnecessary expenses another.
Photo by Flickr user james94103.
This diary came to the Muni Diaries Gmail inbox from Kevin Adler. If you’ve got Muni or BART stories, gripes, or transit news tips, you can email us or submit stories here.
Ileana at Bored is the New Busy sent over a diary on the J during the Chinese New Year Parade earlier in the year:
Iâm on the outbound J, my second favorite train because it comes second closest to my house. I got on at Powell St. station along with a pile of others leaving the Chinese New Year Parade. The crush of bodies boarding the double-time procession of train cars heading anywhere-but-here is unusually dense and unusually overwhelming. We all feel it. We take shallow breaths, inching closer to the edge of the platform, filling one car after another.
Approaching: Outbound K, followed by 2-carNN, followed by one-car J.
The doors on the K open, no one gets off; no one can get on; the doors close. We wait, hope that the NN has room.
A woman in hospital-issue slipper socks squeezes through with the aid of a walker, mumbling, âWhy do I bother? Whatâs the point? Why donât you all go back to goddamn China? We donât need your goddamn parade! Itâs like Iâm not even a citizen in my own country! I canât even get on my own goddamn train because of you people. You go back to China. You go back to China, all of you! Taking away my rights as a citizen.â
The Sunday New York Times yesterday had a great op-ed (or “op-art” as they called it) by Miranda Purves and artist Jason Logan. The pic above is a snippet of the drawings they created by spending a lot of time on buses and subways that may be cut back after an MTA vote to reduce funding. Here, Purves explains why they created the project:
Both Jason and I have always been drawn to this phenomenon of people, behaving for the most part civilly, getting from here to there, side by side. And we wanted to find some way to convey the less tangible costs of service cuts and fare hikes.
I too am drawn to the transit-riding experience for this very same reason – the phenomenon of a group of people who otherwise may never encounter one another, sitting together and having a shared experience. Next time I am on a not-so-crowded bus I will draw up a similar diagram to see what I find! (It’d be near suicide to try to draw up something like this on a packed bus like the morning 38Ls…)
Who are some regulars on your bus? (And, wanna send us your own bus art?)