Wow. I leave town for a few days and come home to hear about all the gas and water drama on the N-Judah I missed, as well as some words of wisdom from new Muni chief Nathaniel Ford.
While it is encouraging to hear a Muni Chief who is willing to buck the naysayers at the MTA who are too busy “balancing budgets” and throwing up their hands at the idea of providing reliable on time service, it’s also a bit troubling when you hear noises that sound a lot like “let’s make the buses on time by just cutting out more stops.” Kinda Soviet-like.
We’ll see, and hope for the best….
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I can’t find any news references yet, but there were at least two Muni incidents on Saturday. A 1-California trolley was in a collision with a new SUV of some sort–it didn’t even have plates yet–near CPMC in Laurel Heights.
An N-Judah train was involved in something near the Ocean Beach end of the line. I couldn’t tell what happened, but an ambulance was on the scene when I was in the area. There was a bus bridge up to Sunset where the trains were turning back. A poor woman in a wheelchair had to load into the bus, go a few stops, unload from the bus, load into the train and unload at her final stop. Ugh.
Saying stop removal is “soviet-like” is how we ended up with the level of service we have.
Muni can’t be improved if stop removal isn’t an option, or if even line consolidation isn’t an option.
We need someone taking a holistic look at Muni and service and how to improve it. I think it speaks well of Nathaniel Ford he recognizes Muni can’t do that themselves and hired on outside firm that’s going to look at it objectively so Muni staff can’t point fingers at traffic and everyone else on earth can’t just tell muni to fix service without removing stops, changing routes or magically make lights turn green (transit signaling is a SFCTA thing, not something Muni can do themselves)
SPUR pointed out combining some of the redundant lines left over from the 1955 Market Street Railway buyout could mean more service along the unified line.
I agree completely, and fully support SPUR’s recommendations, which include consolidation, etc.
My comment was not to suggest we rule out all stop removals forever (something some of our supervisors engage in, facts be damned) more like a tongue in cheek comment that sure, you can make a system run “faster” if you simply remove most of those pesky stops! 🙂
Sometimes comments like that don’t come off in print like they would in person…