Muni Diaries

A hundred Muni buses are being turned into mobile galleries for five local artists, voted by the public, in a project called Muni Art. You might remember this project last year, and this year SFMTA, Supervisor London Breed, and nonprofit SF Beautiful brought the project for another year.

This year’s winners:

• “Teens of SF” by Monica Tiulescu (606 votes)
• “Bit by Bit” by Lillian Shanahan (446 votes)
• “Las Historias” by Luis Pinto (443 votes)
• “City Walks” by Counterpoint Studio (Peter Tonningsen and Lisa Levine) (443 votes)
• “Sight Seeing” by Todd Kurnat (443 votes)

Last year there were 50 buses displaying the winning artists’ work, and this year the project has doubled the number of buses. Here are this year’s winning artists:

Bit by Bit by Lillian Shanahan

Here’s a look at last year’s Muni Art winners. Have you seen the new art on your buses yet?

Last night’s rain apocalypse caused a gnarly evening of commute on both BART and Muni. A tree fell on the tracks of the J-Church train in the photo above, blocking both directions. And a power outage shortly after 7 p.m. blocked all trains between Van Ness and Church, reports the San Francisco Examiner.

Earlier that evening, if you were amongst the evening commute crowd on BART, you’ll know that the fallen tree near the Balboa Station between 24th Street and Balboa station caused a BART outage that snowballed into this scene at BART, where riders were scaling the broken escalator:

Chaos erupts in the #MissionStreet #BART station as storm related delays frustrate riders: #SanFrancisco: https://t.co/2YXMVu4GEH. pic.twitter.com/KdtMvT4pMh

— ABC7 News (@abc7newsbayarea) January 11, 2017

24th Mission Street Station Chaos. #SFBART #BART #SF .@SFBART pic.twitter.com/b5tlV3lUXz

— Charlie K. Perkins (@PerKerry) January 11, 2017

Sanfransokyo @nbcbayarea #sfbart pic.twitter.com/QAGRa8bs58

— Aleksey Smolenchuk (@lxe) January 11, 2017

As of 9 p.m. last night, service was still shut down between Daly City and 24th Street Station, says SFGate. Rescue trains came to get the stranded passengers to free Muni shuttles, reports SFist. In the East Bay, AC Transit buses were also backed up due to a power line falling near a school, reports SFGate.

Got commute updates for your fellow riders? Tag us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. Our email inbox muni.diaries.sf@gmail.com is always open. Stay safe out there, everybody.

Photo by @ongardie. Featured photo by SFist.

If you ride Muni’s light rail trains, there’s some good news for you: the NextBus outage could be fixed as early as tomorrow evening for light rail vehicles. Last Friday the SFMTA said that it would take “a few weeks” to fix NextBus outage caused by network upgrades, affecting over 70 percent of buses. This meant that 70 percent of buses prediction times may not show up on NextMuni signs or mobile apps using NextMuni data.

The vehicles affected included 150 light rail trains and about 500 buses.

SFMTA spokesperson Paul Rose told Muni Diaries this afternoon that most of the light rail vehicles were upgraded Monday evening: “As of last night, more than 130 trains out of the 150 had been upgraded. The rest will be done tonight.”

That leaves the 500 buses in the fleet still needing upgrading. From the official update on the SFMTA blog:

Over the coming weeks, we will continue replacing and reprogramming outdated vehicle modems on the remainder of the Muni fleet. We will continue to upgrade our rail fleet and move onto the approximately 500 buses that have not already been upgraded as part of the Computer Aided Dispatch and Automated Vehicle Location System (CAD/AVL), also know as the radio replacement project. All of this work is being completed by Muni staff along with our NextBus partners.

Meanwhile, Muni shelter signs have been including apologies such as in the photo above. Are you using bus schedules or just sheer force of will to plan your commute?

We’ll keep you updated on how the fix is coming.

Another new year, another driver who didn’t get the memo that the Duboce tunnel is for Muni only. Rider @mikevladimer on Twitter was on the N-Judah when he saw some unfamiliar headlights coming this way in the tunnel going to Cole Valley.

Just last summer another driver made the same mistake, resulting in panicked yelling from Muni workers before escaping out of the tunnel (see this amazingly cringe pic submitted by a rider). Drivers beware: another drunk SUV driver who crashed into the tunnel got community service for the trouble he caused.

Hat tip: Amy at Capp Street Crap.