Category: News

What do you need to know about transit this week? Well:

• SF public invited to help shape future of city subways (SFGate):
  Everyone has a complaint about public transit, but do you have ideas about how it can be better? The city wants to crowdsource your ideas starting today.
• Market Street Muni Shelter Lecture Ends In Beating With Cane (SFist). Things didn’t end so well for the man who told folks partying at a Muni shelter to keep it down.
• Mission Street ‘red lane’ turn restrictions relaxed (SFBay.ca). Two of the six forced right-turns — along Mission Street’s red carpet lanes, as we like to call them — will be removed after merchants protest.

The fantastic inside-the-beast photo is by @telliprego on Instagram. Follow @munidiaries on Instagram to see more.

Image courtesy Carla Romero for The Examiner

Being a Muni operator is no picnic in the park sometimes. Because, FSM knows, even as you’re piloting a Muni vehicle by picnics in the park, any number of surprises and vitriol could launch themselves into your lane.

That’s why it was especially disheartening to see and hear of violence against Muni operators. This past weekend, Muni operator Carla Romero, pictured above, claimed she was attacked by an irate car driver as she reattached the trolley wires outside a 30-Stockton bus. The driver, in turn, claimed Romero attacked him. See the full report on SFExaminer.com.

Romero told The Examiner that she loves working for Muni, but she wants the public to be more aware of the violence operators are subject to out there.

To many of us Muni riders, a great operator can make your day. Cases in point: an operator, Tammy, throwing a party for her passengers on the 33-Stanyan; Driver Doug, who somehow still associates the word “Zen” with Muni after driving it for 17 years; and this Metro operator, who has absolutely no time to wait for shit blocking his path.

Stay safe, everybody, and keep your hands to yourselves whenever possible.

In what’s become rather regular news every other year or so, you’re gonna have to shell out $3 more for your monthly A or M Fast Passes starting next month. So why must we squirrel away more change for the bus?

Since 2009, Muni fares have been set by Muni’s Automatic Fare Indexing Policy, which means that prices are determined by a formula based on monetary inflation and operations costs. The nitty gritty formula is in the fare indexing policy page here.

Here’s a handy chart for the different types of passes:

Source: SFMTA

If you have automatic upload, you’ll see the prices reflected automagically on your statement in mid August for next month’s Fast Pass.

In the meantime, let’s take a little walk down Muni memory lane. When Fast Passes, at relatively bargain-basement prices, showed up more reliably than our buses in fabulous color combinations. Thankfully, many of them live on as art and keepsakes of the hella SF variety.

On the heels of its successful inaugural campaign, Muni Art and San Francisco Beautiful have announced 10 finalists whose art could be chosen to be displayed on Muni buses. The finalists are:

• Marianne Bland
• Counterpoint Studio (Peter Tonningsen and Lisa Levine)
• DrawBridge: An Arts Program for Homeless Children
• Amos Goldbaum
• Ryan Hungerford
• Todd Kurnat
• Luis Pinto
• Lillian Shanahan
• Monica Tiulescu
• Jon Wessel

According to SFMTA:

In addition to having their art displayed on 100 Muni buses, the artist who receives the most public votes will be awarded $2,000 and each of the remaining four will be awarded $1,250.  The public may cast their votes by visiting the web site, www.neighborland.com/muniart/vote. The voting period ends August 29 at 6 p.m.

Good luck to all of the finalists. We’ll announce the winners at the end of August.

Read about 2015’s winners here.

Photo of last year’s winner, Ariel Dunitz-Johnson, courtesy of SF Beautiful