Tales From Olden Days 3

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I decided to play Muni races today — the 5 against the 21. I’m fairly certain that the 5 line outmaneuvers and outruns the 21. (The block-to-block stops on the 21 draws this conclusion.) But the 5 stops about three streets farther from my final destination (Ashbury and Fell), which is why I always opt for the 21 — pure laziness. But the question was: Could I overtake the 21 on foot once the 5 dropped me at my destination? This was something I’d pathetically pondered more times than a sane person should.

As I waited for the bus on Market and Second, I saw my shot to answer this ever-nagging question. Just behind the approaching 5 poked a 21 — back to back. They both came to a stop. So I decided to test my theory, and hopped onto the 5. After we loaded and left, I watched the 21 out of the rear window until the two buses made the split near Seventh street. The race was on.

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Category: Funny: Muni LOLs Tags: ,

Tales From Olden Days 2

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December 2004: It was raining on the platform on 19th avenue across from SF state. There weren’t too many people waiting, telling me I had just missed the outbound M. Amazingly enough, though, there was another coming in about two minutes. Not enough time to pull out a magazine. And plus, it was a windy rain, and the platform roof wouldn’t have done much to protect the pages.
I noticed only one other rider on my end of the platform: an Asian guy with a football team’s baseball hat. Maroon. 49ers. Very everyday San Francisco.

We boarded the M, shoes squeaking in that way that they do only on rainy days inside a Muni train. I sat down and he took his seat in the row directly in front of me. No one else was on in the front of the train where we were.

A couple of stops later, now in Oceanview, two young women got on. They seemed to be SF State students as well, but not your mid-career, second-degree type. No, they were young. If I had to guess, I’d say 19, maybe 20.

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Category: diaries, WTF: Weirdness on Muni Tags: ,

Tales From Olden Days 1

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Okay, bear with me while I post a couple of years-old stories from aboard Muni. Here’s the first:

March 2006: As I stood waiting for the 22 at 16th and Mission, I noticed a somewhat attractive woman approach the stop. A couple minutes later, the bus arrived, and seeing as how there were only a couple of other boarders besides myself, I kindly let this woman get on first.

I stood patiently behind her as she approached the fare machine, and she had some kind of words with the driver. I couldn’t quite make out what she said, but I did notice that she neglected to pay.

She turned and started walking back on a medium-filled coach. She took a couple of steps away from the machine, and as she did, I stepped up. With people behind me waiting to get on still standing outside the bus, I was doing my best to keep the flow of bus traffic moving steadily along.

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Category: diaries, Funny: Muni LOLs Tags: ,

83-Year-Old Struck by Bus Was Flagging It Down

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According to SFGate:

“An 83-year-old pedestrian struck by a Municipal Railway bus on Wednesday afternoon remains in critical condition, police said Thursday.

The male victim suffered severe injuries to his pelvis and both legs when he was run over by a 38-Geary bus at Fillmore Street and Geary Boulevard in the Western Addition.”

Read more of Rachel Gordon’s report in The Chronicle.

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Welcome to Muni Diaries

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Well, finally!

What started in 2004 in a journalism class at San Francisco State University has now found its way, four years later, to the internet.

The idea wasn’t mine, originally, but was intended to be part of a magazine that covered San Francisco culture, neighborhood by neighborhood, with a very youthful slant. My co-editor Eugenia gets all the credit for Muni Diaries as an idea. Together, we decided it’s way cheaper and easier to do a website than to start a magazine from the ground-up. We brought a programmer/designer type on board, and had us an alpha site for a while.

Then we all got jobs.

A few years later, as blogging has taken off and become so easy that moms and dads the world over are doing it, I had the idea to just hatch this thing as a WordPress blog, and let it grow organically.

The idea is to create a forum specifically for anything having to do with public transportation in San Francisco. We’re gonna try to keep BART out of it (hint: we own bartdiaries.com, which may or may not launch soon, depending on the success of this site), and stick exclusively to:

  • Stories of riding and waiting for Muni buses, light rails, and cable cars
  • News stories involving Muni, especially accidents
  • Agency news and commentary, especially gripes against fare increases and route rescheduling
  • Hotties spotted on Muni
  • Photos and video of any of the above
  • Other topics, which I’m sure will present themselves over time

So please, feel free to contribute, comment, and tell your friends that they have a forum to talk with others about their experiences on San Francisco’s hated, yet loved public transportation system. – Jeff

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