Your place to share stories on and off the bus.
In the latest installment of “Gotta Get It Home Somehow,” Muni rider dee brings us this passenger on the K-Ingleside with what looks like a big ol’ trash can. Or am I wrong and this isn’t a big ol’ trash can?
Oh, well. You know … gotta get it home somehow.
BART operator Kelly Beardsley lets us in on one little secret about driving BART: passengers love pressing the intercom button to chat with him about annoyances big and small, or even to just shoot the shit with him for no reason at all. Our live storytelling show, Muni Diaries Live, is where you can hear stories that are at once both true and unbelievable. Here’s Kelly recounting the shenanigans over the intercom on one eventful BART ride.
I love intercom calls, they always crack me up. You know on BART at the end there’s that little box that says, In Case of Emergency, Call the Operator?” Sometimes people just push it and just chat me up. Like, “Hey, I noticed you just made another transfer announcement at Lake Merritt Station. I don’t usually hear transfer announcements at Lake Merritt Station for the Dublin-Pleasanton bound passengers. Are you going to make a transfer announcement at Bay Fair?” And i’m just like, “Oh I like to mix it up! I like to make sure people get to where they need to go!” And the guy’s like, “Oh that’s really cool, man, so what other places do you make transfer announcements?”
We get stupid calls, we get fun calls, and we get complaint calls like, “Hey! Hey! There’s this girl and she’s got a bike and she’s eating a burrito and she’s in the handicapped seat!”
If you want to hear stories like this and other true and hilarious tales, come to the next Muni Diaries Live show on Nov. 5!
Muni Diaries Live
Tickets
Saturday, Nov 5, 2016
Doors: 6 p.m., show: 7 p.m.
Elbo Room
647 Valencia Street, San Francisco
Take Muni there: J-Church, 12, 14, 22, 33, 49, or BART: 16th or 24th St. stations
Photo by Kevin Wong/Right Angle Images
“It keeps going and going and going…”
And by “it,” we mean the heaping dose of visual irony pictured here, courtesy of csuhpat1, who also points out the rush-hour manspreading action.
A friendly reminder that it’s only cool to man- or lady-spread in sparsely populated Muni vehicles.
Hear our best Muni stories live on stage! Muni Diaries Live is back on Nov. 5 at the Elbo Room. Tickets on sale now!
Forget “where’s my bus??” Where in god’s name is my NextBus?!
An outage on Sunday at NextBus left thousands of riders extra clueless about when the bus was coming, according to a report in The Examiner. The outage meant that you couldn’t even use third-party apps to see when the next Muni was coming, because those apps and arrival signs pull from the system’s data.
Service was restored early afternoon, but not before lots of angry riders took to the Twitters with their WTF.
If you ever find yourself minus a bus and predictive technology, you can always rely on the most accurate Next Bus sign in the city to keep it 100.
Photo: San Francisco Examiner
You’ve seen Muni bingo, Muni haiku, a one-woman band, a puppet show, and stellar storytellers on stage … What else do we have in store for you at the next Muni Diaries Live? You’ll have to come party with us at the Elbo Room on Nov. 5 to find out! The full lineup is here, and it’s gonna be a good one.
For this show, we are adding something a little different: when you buy a ticket, you can also give to Food Runners, the San Francisco non-profit organization that’s currently delivering over 15 tons of food a week that would otherwise be thrown away. Food Runners picks up excess food from businesses and delivers it to agencies feeding the hungry.
Tickets
Saturday, Nov 5, 2016
Doors: 6 p.m., show: 7 p.m.
Elbo Room
647 Valencia Street, San Francisco
Take Muni there: J-Church, 12, 14, 22, 33, 49, or BART: 16th or 24th St. stations
Photo by Right Angle Images
New train in town. pic.twitter.com/uBaUxQLPli
— SFBART (@SFBART) October 16, 2016
If you blinked, you might’ve missed it—last weekend BART slowly rolled out (get it?) a test model of its new fleet of trains for some of us to “oooh” and “ahhhh” over. SFGate has details on upcoming tests if you didn’t catch this one:
Overnight testing for the train should start in the next two weeks, said Paul Oversier, assistant general manager for BART, with daytime runs starting in December and tests with passengers starting in early 2017.
According to that same SFGate post, some people who did get to ride lodged some complaints:
Regular BART commuters from Pleasant Hill and elsewhere into the East Bay bemoaned the lack of seats available on the new cars. Already, the current cars with four more seats are overcrowded, they said, and standing for an hour commute isn’t exactly comfortable.
Changes from the current fleet include: more standing room, higher ceilings, a more-efficient AC system, three boarding doors per car (versus the current two), and better ways to secure bicycles. BART’s plan is to have 775 new cars by 2021 to try to keep up with an ever-expanding ridership.
Hear our best Muni stories live on stage! Muni Diaries Live is back on Nov. 5 at the Elbo Room. Tickets on sale now!