Category: News

Photo by Lynn Friedman

A new ad campaign designed to break stereotypes of homeless people is scheduled to go up on Muni buses and BART stations starting today, according to SFGate. The ad campaign was commissioned by the Coalition on Homelessness, and shows “clean, normally dressed, pleasant looking people who are homeless,” the SFGate post says.

More:

The ads also include facts like “Most homeless S.F. residents were residents before they were homeless.” (According to the most recent homeless count, 61 percent of homeless people in the city were living in San Francisco when they became homeless.)

Another ad shows a mother holding a little girl with the line, “There are enough homeless children in San Francisco to fill 35 Muni buses.” (The school district estimates there are 2,100 homeless kids in the city’s public schools.)

“We want people to see pictures of people who are homeless and think, ‘Gee, that’s weird. They don’t look homeless to me,’” [Matthew] Gerring[, a coalition staffer] said. “We’re attempting to catch people off guard by getting at their heartstrings, which is how you change people’s minds.”

The ads will be up for about a month. Let us know if you see one and it causes you to rethink your attitudes toward the homeless in our city.

A bus powered by human waste is up and running in the U.K., says Mashable. How, you ask? The bus is powered by biomethane gas, which is made from human waste. And in case you wonder if poop-powered bus might smell like poop (or just smell like how Muni usually does), Mashable says that the biomethane gas actually doesn’t smell much like anything.

From Mashable:

The “Bio-Bus” seats 40 passengers and can travel up to 186 miles on one tank of the smelly stuff. The amount of biomethane gas it takes to produce one tank is roughly how much is produced annually by five people. The bus currently travels between Bristol Airport and Bath city center.

If you’re worried about the bus smelling like poop — which, let’s be honest, most buses already do — you can calm down. Impurities are removed to create “virtually odorless” emissions. The gas itself is stored in tanks on the roof of the bus.

Well, we know that most of you have smelled (or even seen) poop on the bus – could this be our future? Or maybe on BART, because we know where to find poop on BART!

Photo via Wessex Water/Rex/Associated Press