Muni Diaries Wins Best Local Blog — SFBG Best of the Bay Reader’s Poll

best-of-the-bay

Holy euphoria! Thanks to your votes, Muni Diaries just nabbed San Francisco Bay Guardian’s Best of the Bay Reader’s Poll for Best Local Blog! We are breathless with excitement and so thankful to everyone who voted for us, especially those of you who submitted your gross, funny, and poignant Muni stories, reenacted them on stage at our spoken-word party in June, or gave us your two cents in the comments section.

We created Muni Diaries as a place where anyone riding Muni can share stories and talk about our public transit system — one of the few common experiences shared by San Franciscans of all stripes. We created the space, but you made the blog, so thank you, thank you, thank you! Our sanity as bloggers depends on our supportive network of blogger friends such as whatimseeing.comSFist, SFAppeal, MissionMission (winning editor’s choice for “Best Virtual Mission“), MissionLocal, I Live Here: SF, Eye on Blogs, Tenderblog, and Broke Ass Stuart’s Goddamn Website (which won “Best Local Website” this year!). Our transit blogger friends like Muni Manners, N-Judah Chronicles, and Transbay Blog also keep us in check.

So please keep the stories, photos, and videos coming! We can’t get enough.

xoxo, your Muni Diaries crew:

Eugenia, Jeff, Jenny, Suzanne, and Tara.

Dearly departed: A call for Muni Obituaries

Rising Over Muni
Photo by Flickr user smadden

Some of your favorite lines are going the way of the dinosaur come October, folks. But since the SF Municipal Transit Agency is banking on the fact that you don’t even know they exist, it perhaps ain’t no thang to you.

When in October? Mid-October. We can’t get more specific than that. Neither can SFMTA, apparently.

Anyhoo, we’re putting out a call for obituaries* for these dearly departed lines. Though I’ve personally stopped in my tracks and pointed at such oddities as the 53-Southern Heights (southern who?), some of you rode these lines regularly. And, undoubtedly, some of you will rightly miss their presence. Whenever they decided to grace you with their presence, that is.

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Comment from AppTight on the Routesy-NextBus-NBIS story

On Monday, Tara’s post about Routesy and NextBus and NBIS received a belated comment from Kelly Beener, the VP of Marketing at AppTight, the company that makes iCommute-SF,  a Routesy iPhone app competitor. (confused? check out the story to learn more.) It was a long and thoughtful comment. But because Muni Diaries is, for now, a blog, posts tend to fade away into obscurity. We felt that because AppTight is a player in this story, it was right to alert our readers of Kelly’s comment. Here’s a taste:

We’ve closely followed the progression of this controversy and understand why it is that there are so many differing opinions and why people can have such differing convictions as to who has what rights as it’s a lengthy history with many revisions, contracts, acquisitions and tranfers. That being said, we are quite happy with our relationship with NBIS and feel that it ultimately achieves the best possible service for the consumers.

Click here to read the full story and comments.

Light-rail vehicles collide at West Portal, dozens injured (w/updates + video)

Muni Crash at West Portal Station in San Francisco
Photo by Flickr user chrisjbarker

Started seeing many tweets just now about an apparent Muni collision near West Portal Station. We’ll try to update this post as frequently as possible with new information. For now, there are reports of 12 injuries, and delays on the K, L, and M lines in both directions. Updates are in reverse-chronological order, beginning with the latest:

Update:(Wednesday) just caught wind, via Twitter, of the first-ever videos of the crash, from SFGateSF Appeal (wtf, SFGate?):

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From a West Portal resident: ‘Wrong Solution to Saturday’s Tragedy’

Outbound
Photo by Flickr user Jamison Weiser

Media attention has turned to the manual controls of the Muni trains in the West Portal accident. We received the following email from rider and West Portal resident Mark:

Let me first say that my heart goes out to all of those who were injured Saturday afternoon in the Muni accident at West Portal.  That said, I feel like it is necessary to speak my mind on what happened because I feel that I have a unique opinion which I have not yet seen expressed by anyone in the media.

As of Monday, the media has finally drawn its attention to the procedure of taking trains off control of the ATC [editor’s note: Automatic Train Control] prior to entering West Portal Station.  As a long-time resident of the West Portal area, I know that this has been going on almost ever since the ATC went online; any regular Muni patron knows this as well. If there is no train currently in the station, the ATC brings the train in.  If there is already a train in the station, especially if it’s only a one-car train, as it was on Saturday, once the ATC has stopped the train outside of the station, drivers usually switch off the computer and take the train in manually so two trains can load/unload at the same time.  This is a very efficient procedure because West Portal is both a bottleneck inbound and outbound, as only one train can enter/exit at a time, so often during commute hours trains will be waiting to enter/exit West Portal Station.  By allowing the driver to bring in the train in manual mode, the driver takes full advantage of the three-car length platform and speeds things up a bit, which in my experience makes a big difference.

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Muni Promises Another Crackdown on Fare-Evasion

"Sir, You Are Not Allowed To Take Pictures On Muni Property!!"
Photo by Plug1

Muni wants your two dollars. Seriously.

The city is losing “tens of millions of dollars a year” due to fare evasion, and the agency is going to step up in collecting fare, says Transportation chief Nathaniel Ford.

Well, duh.

As SFist wisely pointed out, you can probably figure out that fare evasion is a big problem if you’ve ever been on any Muni line. However, the agency had placed a team of Muni employees and interns on buses and Metro stations to track the fare-evasion problem, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Ford told the Chronicle that 35,000 observations have been logged, but no word on the exact analysis of this data and how this supposed crackdown will proceed.

One of the hurdles in enforcing fare is that Muni operators can’t actually physically make fare evaders get off the bus, SFWeekly‘s Joe Eskenazi points out. And who wants to stay on the bus while the driver spends time arguing with riders who either won’t get off or pay up?

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