Your place to share stories on and off the bus.
Photo by @Shanna
We had no idea either, until we asked our Muni driver friend, who has an answer for us. “This is a measure for how much sand is left in the bags on the Light Rail Vehicles. The LRVs use a lot of sand on rainy days or for hard braking.”
The LRVs carry sand under the seats and drops sand onto the tracks for traction on rainy days or for hard braking in other situations.
One mystery solved.
Photo by Bill Swingle
I was riding Muni home late tonight from downtown from 4th and Market, I think on the 6 outbound. At the very back row of the bus was a young woman, probably somewhere between age 16 and 20, sitting by herself. There were 15 to 20 people on the bus.
Around 5th or 6th street, a group of three or four men dressed in hoodies got on and were standing close to one another at the entrance of the rear door. I assume they were whispering or talking quietly to each other, but I had headphones on and couldn’t hear. They were fiddling with something in their hoodies’ pockets.
Nothing unusual was going on, and shady people on Muni is nothing new, so I looked out the window for a few moments. Around 8:30 p.m., at the 8th Street island, suddenly there was yelling and shouting coming from the front and back of the bus. I see at least two of the men rush from the back out the doors, and one man fighting with the girl, who was screaming at him to leave her. I saw something that looked like a gun in his right hand as he was grabbing her hand holding her phone with his left. I saw him punch her in the face twice and then run out the rear door with her phone. This all happened in the span of about 10 seconds.
The bus driver stopped the bus and someone nearer to her called 911. The girl was holding her face which was red but didn’t appear to be bleeding. She looked like she was on the verge of tears. On the seat next to me was a clip from the gun, presumably dropped during the flight, which someone else noticed and picked up. They speculated that it was a clip to a fake gun or a bebe gun, but I don’t know if it was or not. SFPD showed up in minutes.
The SFMTA told us that their video unit is pulling video of the incident. Be careful out there, everyone.
Seems like quite a lot of work to save $2. And if you can afford an Android phone, you should probably pay for your bus ride, no?
Nevertheless, the security specialists, Corey Benninger and Max Sobell from the Intrepidus Group, have alerted the SFMTA as well as New Jersey’s PATH system, both transit systems that could be vulnerable to this kind of hack.
From SFGate:
Intrepidus staffers met with Muni and Path officials last year to notify them of the potential for abuse. The firm also presented the information at a security conference in Europe last week.
“We had hoped this would be fixed on both systems before we released this data, but our understanding is that’s not planned for possibly years down the line,” Benninger said.
Since other transit agencies could adopt a similar payment system, they wanted to highlight the security issues.
A limited version of Intrepidus’ app is available to transit agencies that want to test whether their smart cards are vulnerable. But it doesn’t have the capability to change or reset the cards’ data, Benninger said.
The SFMTA told SFGate that they have not noticed any discernible change in the use of paper Limited Use fare cards. A fix for the security hole could be costly, but one option could be to reduce the 90-day life of these types of tickets to discourage hacking, SFGate reports.
Have you seen the two winners of the 100 Days, 100 Muni Stories contest on the bus today?
Earlier this summer, we hosted a “100 Days, 100 Muni Stories” contest to celebrate Muni’s centennial. The prize for your awesome Muni tales? Your own spotlight on the bus! We looked through all the entries past and present, including submissions and tweets, and recruited Isaac Fitzgerald, the managing editor of The Rumpus, as the guest judge.
Our “100 Days, 100 Muni Stories” winners are @scenechangego and @jeannabarrett, and you can see their tweets on buses starting this week!
In case you are new to Muni Diaries, we are just three blog nerds chained to our laptops in our living rooms, making a website for stories that happen on the bus. That is, we are an independent website and not affiliated with the SFMTA. So we were as surprised and excited as anyone can be when the SFMTA said we can have some ad space on the bus to feature your best stories and tweets!
Here’s Jeanna’s winning tweet:
Muni Diaries is your space to share stories, tweets, and photos that happen on public transit, so thank you to everyone who submitted to the contest and the site. Let’s blow up the party talk some more!
Muni Diaries “100 Days, 100 Muni Stories” graphic design is by Lisa Wong Jackson. Check her out at Good on Paper.
Honey, if you really love me you would buy me a ball gag made from a mooncake, because this is what’s happening this weekend in your weekend transit advisory:
Chinatown Autumn Moon Festival
The 22nd annual Chinatown Autumn Moon Festival will take place on Saturday and Sunday between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. each day. For event details, please visit www.moonfestival.org
The following Muni routes will be affected:
Roadworks Street Fair
On Saturday the 9th Annual Roadworks presented by the San Francisco Center for the Books will take place from noon to 5 p.m. on Rhode Island Street between 16th and 17th streets. For event details, please visit sfcb.org/events/roadworks.
The following Muni routes will be affected
Cole Valley Fair
On Sunday the 10th Cole Valley Fair will take place. For more details, please visit www.bazaarbizarre.org
The following Muni lines and routes will be affected
Folsom Street Fair
On Sunday the Folsom Street Fair will be held from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
The following Muni routes will be affected:
The Bay Citizen reports that the SFMTA has issued an accurate on-time report, after being called out by the publication in July that the agency was boosting these numbers. From SFMTA’s latest report, Muni’s vehicles were on time 57.2 percent of the time in August. “That number was slightly down from July when the on-time rate was 60.4 percent, according to the report, which covered the first eight months of 2012,” the Bay Citizen writes.
In July, the Bay Citizen also reported that then-CEO Nat Ford and another former CEO, Michael Burns, received bonuses because of these inflated rates.
From the Bay Citizen:
[Paul] Rose, the SFMTA spokesman attributed the 57.2 percent on-time rate in August to a combination of bus driver absences, rickety old vehicles, a Muni operator shortage and special events such as the America’s Cup yacht race that spread service too thin.
…
Muni officials have long said that on-time performance isn’t the most important measure. Passengers, they reason, would rather that buses arrive consistently every five minutes rather than adhering to specific scheduled times.
On Friday, Muni also released other performance measures, such as how often buses bunch up together and create long waits for riders at bus stops. The number crunchers found that buses that were less than two minutes behind each other nearly 6 percent of the time.
What do you think: what metric is the most important to you as a bus rider?