Not Mincing Words for Muni or Gavin Newsom

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Muni HQ
Photo by Flickr user Dawn Endico

Well, well. Our friend Matty Matt is never one to BS. That’s especially true in this eviscerating post he just published over at the NBC Bay Area website, trashing Mayor Would-be Governor Newsom and MTA for their self-congratulations of Muni’s improved* on-time record for the previous year. Some choice quotes from Matt’s article:

How could the Gavinator be so out of touch? Maybe it’s because Muni’s keeping the mayor’s office in the dark, just like they keep their own customers in the dark.

[A]lthough the longer-term average is up, the most recent metric shows that on-time performance has recently gone down. Not included in either article is any mention of the wide latitude that Muni affords itself for determining “on-time”: drivers have a window of about five minutes to deviate from schedule.

SF Gate’s article about the on-time report, here.

The Examiner’s, here.

Category: diaries, WTF: Weirdness on Muni Tags:

Going Underground This Weekend

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Bay Bridge Construction
Photo by Flickr user planetlight

They say the ferries are nice, too. But site this isn’t Ferry Diaries (idea!).

This post serves as a reminder to readers that with the Bay Bridge closure that begins this Thursday and extends through to next Tuesday morning, BART will be running 24-hour service, with some details that are worth understanding.

  • First, the special schedule begins Friday, Sept. 4 (overnight, what some call Thursday night) and lasts through Monday, Sept. 7.
  • On Monday, during the day, BART will be operating on a Saturday schedule.
  • From 1 a.m. to 4 a.m. on those days, trains will be spaced roughly one hour apart.
  • Trains will only operate 24 hours per day out of the following stations:

East Bay


San Francisco and Peninsula

After knowledge, preparation is power. If you need to move around a lot this weekend, or to bolt out of town, do so armed with the knowledge that you don’t have to know the way to San Jose and back up, around the Bay, to get where you’re going. Oh, and happy Labor Day from BART Diaries!

Category: News Tags:

Send Us Your Muni Obituaries

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Bus Graveyard

The 4-Sutter, a long-time friend, died this October after a lengthy battle with ridership and budgets. The 4-Sutter developed a tiny but loyal following during his lifetime. He is survived by his family of Muni lines.

Okay, there’s my obit for the 4 (sniff, sniff). Where’s yours?

We are collecting obituaries for the poor Muni lines that are getting the axe this fall. Send us your best tales from these lines, or honor the lines with your own death notice. Mark them “Muni Obituary” and send it to muni.diaries.sf@gmail.com by September 30 and we’ll publish them here during October, when the lines go quiet.

We’ve so far received odes to the 20-Columbus and 26-Valencia, but where’s the love for the other dying routes according to the SFMTA website:

* 4-Sutter
* 7-Haight
* 16AX-Noriega “A” Express
* 53-Southern Heights
* 89-Laguna Honda

We’ve also received at least one suggested obituary for one of the route segments that’s getting the guillotine: the 38-Geary Ocean Beach branch. Here’s a list of the other line portions that are going the way of the dodo:

* N-Judah on The Embarcadero and King Street (weekends only)
* 1-California south of Sacramento (weekdays only)
* 2-Clement west of 14th Avenue
* 10-Townsend north of Broadway and to Transbay Terminal
* 12-Folsom/Pacific along The Embarcadero
* 18-46th Avenue along Geary and Point Lobos
* 21-Hayes west of Stanyan
* 29-Sunset in the Presidio north of Baker Beach
* 36-Teresita from Monterey/Foerster to Balboa Park BART
* 38-Geary Ocean Beach branch
* 41-Union between Lyon and Steiner
* 67-Bernal Heights on portions of Crescent and Mission
* 88-BART Shuttle west of I-280
* 108-Treasure Island between Transbay Terminal and Caltrain

Remember, you have until September 30 to pen your draft and get it in to Muni Diaries. We look forward to reading them!

Category: News Tags: ,

Wear Your Muni Love: Muni-Inspired Shirts and Other Goodies (updates)

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punkpunk

Update: (Sept. 1, 2009. 10:30 a.m.) Since we first published this post, we’ve received a few more juicy bits of Muni merchandise.

First, as seen at SF Zine Fest, PunkPunk is selling FastPass buttons and pins (above).

At $5 a pop, get ’em while they’re available. I’ll have a set of 12, please.

Then, niffx on Zazzle informed of these totally rad Muni curvy-logo shirts (perhaps the source of many people’s misguided belief that Muni is an all-cap acronym?):

munishirt

These shirts are $22.75, so save your pennies and help these artists out. You’ll look good doing it, if we do say so ourselves 😉

Original post:
walter konig muni shirts
Muni Shirts by Walter Konig

The phrase “economic stimulus package” always makes me feel a little inappropriate. But say you have some extra cash to, er, help the economy — we’ve found some great Muni stuff for you to spend it on.

Muni Shirts by Walter Konig (of Walnotes) are based on a design that was sold in New York a few years ago. “When I saw them I wondered why they didn’t have them for San Francisco. So I sat in Cafe Abir and designed them. I used a Muni Map to figure out locations along the way,” Walter told us.

The shirts come in a variety of colors, many of them printed on American Apparel tees.

Buy Muni Shirts by Walnotes here:

Brand Fury (780 Sutter St)
Artist X-Change (3169 16th near Guerrero)
SoMe (Haight, east of Masonic)
440 Brannan

Walter said that Lower Hater (597 Haight Street) will have them soon, too.

More shirts and other goodies after the jump, including a really awesome hoodie with an old-school Muni bus print and buttons made from old transfers.

Read more

Category: News Tags:

Some sort of FAIL going on underground

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Outbound Downtown
Photo by Flickr user satanslaundromat

Twitter is literally going bonkers right now with a reported Muni Metro FAIL taking place as we type. Here are some choice tweets:

To reiterate a question from Whole Wheat Toast, “Has SFMTA released a TroubleAlert yet?” Doesn’t look like it. If you know something about WTF is going on, let us know. If you have pictures or anecdotes, same thing goes: muni.diaries.sf@gmail.com.

Category: News
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