Another sweepstakes from Commuter Nation

Okay, we missed the live event last week (sorry!). But we’re here, this week, promoting this pretty nifty giveaway. Check it out:

Win a FREE year of commuting with the Commuter Nation RIDE FREE Sweepstakes!

What: Commuter Nation campaign, is giving away over 10 years of free commuting during the Commuter Nation RIDE FREE Sweepstakes!

When: Monday, September 21, through Saturday, October 17. On October 7, Commuter Nation teams will be at Fourth and King Street Station from 6:30 a.m. – 10:30 a.m. and Embarcadero Station from 4:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.

Where: Commuter Nation website: http://www.commuternation.com.

Why: With the current Muni & BART fares, you might be unaware that you could decrease the burden of commuting costs by participating in commuter benefits through your employer. The Commuter Nation RIDE FREE Sweepstakes is giving commuters a chance to win free commuting, and learn about how they can save each month by participating in their employer’s commuter benefits program.

Pron for Transit Nerds

SF_mainlines

San Francisco Main Lines

I was poking around Market Street Railway blog the other day when I came across the bad-ass-est site: It’s called San Francisco Cityscape, and it’s a virtual emporium of transit maps, photos of the city, even iPhone background-sized images of wonders like the Golden Gate Bridge or the cable cars on California mountain Street.

But yeah, it’s those transit map that really drew me in. Here are a couple (click image to see original in a new tab/window), but hop on over to SF Cityscapes to fully ingest these visual wonders.

bay_rail

San Francisco Bay Area Rail Transit

And my favorite …

CAHSR

California High-Speed Rail

Be our 1,000th Twitter follower, win a Muni T-shirt! (update w/winner)

twitter-hashclouds

Update (Friday, Sept. 18, 2009, 4:00 p.m.): And the winner is … memeticfield of San Francisco. Congrats!

Update (Friday, Sept. 18, 2009, 9:22 a.m.): We have a winner! Just not sure who it is yet … more to come.

Original post: Shameless self-promotion? Sure. Bean-counting? Maybe. Winning free stuff? Hell yeah!

Muni Diaries is proud to say that we’re fast approaching our milestone 1,000th follower on Twitter. In order to perhaps get there a little faster, and to show our appreciation, Walter Koning is offering one of his awesome Muni T-shirts as a prize to that on-the-nose 1,000th, non-spam, non-Brittney-fucked-vids follower. We’d like you to at least be from SF or the Bay Area, as much as we love our peeps in other time zones. So spread the word. We’ll announce the Twitterer who nails it at 1K as an update to this post once that happens. Stay tuned …

P.S. Don’t stop with a follow. Spread your Muni stories here, and tell your friends about Muni Diaries.

BART Photos on Flickr

Pink plastic bags
Photo by Flickr user echoes71

Hi everyone,

Though BART Diaries was begun by the same people who started and moderate Muni Diaries, we’re a whole new beast. We’re about as different as the systems we write about. Sure, Muni and BART have the same goal in mind — moving people for a still relatively low fee from Point A to Point B. But anyone who’s taken a ride (or been taken for a ride, as it were) on both systems knows the vast contrast between the two systems.

So here on BART Diaries, we’ll need to reach out every now and then, to remind you that you make this site what it is. It is your stories, your photos, your news tips, that will fill the posts here.

On that note, we’d like to announce our very own place on Flickr for BART photos. This is a place you can tag your BART photos for potential use as a photo diary, or to be considered for “stock photos,” the more generic pictures we use to enhance almost every post.

So keep on sending your stories to us (bartdiaries@gmail.com) and be sure and tag your Flickr photos to the BART Photos group. Help us spread the word, out to the ends of the lines (talking about you, Millbrae, Richmond, Pittsburg, Dublin and Pleasanton, and Fremont), and let’s shape this into the awesome site it has the potential to be. Happy commuting and storytelling!

Going Underground This Weekend

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!

Send Us Your Muni Obituaries

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!

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