Scowl, Nu?

So I get on the bus at 7:15 AM to go to work, and I all of a sudden smell the smell of cat pee. Where is that coming from? I think. It’s not me is it? The cat didn’t pee in my bag, did she? If it was me, I would’ve smelled it when I left the house. Where is that smell coming from? I keep standing and riding (because the bus is packed, of course) and standing, and riding, until someone gets out at their stop and a seat opens up. I sit down.

Now I know where the smell is coming from. Great.

Ok, time to play a little game called: How to avoid getting smacked by Avery when riding the bus.

• DON’T sneak in through the back door because you don’t want to pay the $1.00 fare.
• REALLY DON’T do this and then pretend that you don’t speak English when the driver then tells you to get off.
• DO get off the bus when the driver decides that he’s not going to leave the stop because you sneaked in and everyone on the bus starts screaming for you to get the hell off.
• DON’T yabber in Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Spanish at the top of your lungs to your countryman sitting four rows behind you.
• DO get up from the seats marked “reserved for the elderly and handicapped” if someone who is elderly and/or handicapped comes in.
• DO have your money or your MUNI pass ready before you get on the bus.
• DON’T play rap (or any other music) on your boom box… at any volume.
• AND FINALLY… DON’T EVER stand in the stairwell when I want to get out at my stop.

Tuesday morning, I left for work at the usual time. It had been raining horribly all throughout the night, and the wind was gusting so strongly that the sound of the windows rattling woke me up a few times.

Still, when I left Tuesday morning, the rain was letting up… it was really gray and drizzly, but nothing that severe. The morning news reported no delays on MUNI, so I figured that it would be an uneventful ride to the office.

Boy, was I wrong.

As soon as I stepped out of the door, I noticed a bus coming down my street… which is bizarre, because the buses don’t run on my street. The buses run on Haight street, one block south. I figured that it was out of service and returning to the depot. Then I noticed that it was full of people.

The bus pulled up to the corner and opened its door, so I ran up to the door and got in. I figured, what the hell… it’s a 71 Noriega bus, and it’s heading in the right direction… even if it’s on the wrong street.

It ended up that a large tree fell down on Haight Street between Steiner and Pierce. It totalled a couple of cars, blocked traffic, and it also knocked down the electric bus power lines. You see, in San Francisco, most of the east-west buses run on overhead power lines. You lose the Haight Street power grid, and only the infrequently scheduled half-sized diesel buses run. The result? Thousands of people crammed into these oversized mini-vans running at 1/3 the normal bus schedule. Needless to say, the commute in sucked.

No wonder the Examiner (the afternoon paper) reported that on a recent survey over 80% of all MUNI passengers are dissatisfied with MUNI service.

When I leave for work at 7:00 AM, I can usually catch a bus that’s not packed full of people, and many times even get a seat. The past few days have been quite another story. Since I was summoned for jury duty and subsequently (almost immediately, I might add) chosen for one, I don’t have to leave the apartment until 8:30. At that point, you can just about forget about catching a bus, because once they do start to appear, they’re usually too packed to let anyone on.

The first day of jury duty, I had to be at the courthouse at 9:15 AM. As usual, I left the apartment and walked down to the bus stop with a semi-spring in my step that only an extra hour of sleep on a weekday can give you, but the instant I saw the size of the crowd assembled there, a feeling of impending doom took over. Buses were coming by, but they — of course — were packed wall-to-wall with people. Normally, if this happens, I just walk the four or so blocks down to the Underground trains and have better luck. When I got there this time, there was a train sitting at the entrance to the tunnel…not moving. Behind it were two more trains, also, obviously, not moving. At this point, I had already wasted precious commuting minutes waiting for the bus and walking to the trains, but decided to stand around to see if the trains actually started moving, which, of course, they did not. Breaking into a slight panic, I racked my brain trying to think how on earth I was supposed to get to the courthouse. I didn’t have time to walk all that way, there were no alternate bus routes that got me anywhere close, and any part of the Underground would be backed up for god knows how long, at this rate. I decided to run back up to the bus stop.

More precious minutes tick by. I hot-foot it back up the four blocks — uphill, this time — get back to the bus stop, look up the street and feel my panic level rise as I see no busses whatsoever. Cursing the city of San Francisco with all of it’s lenient policies and laid-back attitudes about time and responsibility, I start walking to the courthouse. Quickly. I get all the way to the next bus stop and for the hell of it, turn around to look up the street again and, lo and behold, there’s an actual bus! As it approaches, I realize that there are more people on that bus than the law probably allows, but got on anyway and ended up standing right next to the bus driver (which, if you’re not an avid public transportation-taker like myself, is not exactly the safest place to stand, as there is essentially nothing to hold on to.) Another girl got on behind me and was standing so close to the windshield, she would have had no problem going right through it if the bus had made a quick stop.

The same scenario happened to me today (when will I ever learn?) but this time I actually got on one of the trains and it moved steadily along…until it got the the entrance to the tunnel, where it stopped. And sat. Until it moved 20 or so feet, where it stopped again. And sat. (Repeat this sentence 10 times, while picturing me panic as I picture me walking into a courtroom filled with people waiting for me, and only me, and having the judge yell at me, and only me.)

Last Sunday, the only two things that Avery and I did were go out for dim sum and go to the gym, and between all the waiting, and the putt-putt 15-mph so-called bus-driving, and more waiting, and the transferring to another bus and even more waiting, it literally took us all day. Ahhh, San Francisco.You can’t have a car, because there are virtually no parking spaces, and you can’t take MUNI, because it never runs properly. So, what’s the solution?

I don’t know…a good pair of comfortable shoes?

THE GREAT BLACKOUT OF 1998
Because San Francisco is such an environmentally conscious city, they decided that whenever possible, all bus lines and subway lines should run on electric power. DC cables line most of the city, and the major downtown lines all are electric. On top of that, the subways are all electric.

Well, guess what happens when the power goes out for a whole city, and the public transit system doesn’t have backup generators…

At 8:18am, the buses and subways just stopped. No coasting, no warning, they just stopped. The people who were above ground were lucky. They could just get out and walk to where they needed to go. However, for the estimated 2000 people who were stuck underground, they had to be evacuated through the subway tunnels. Some people were stuck underground for hours before they saw daylight again.

MUNI responded by running all of their diesel buses (about 500 of them) along all of the major routes. In addition, Da Mayor, Willie Brown, declared the city in a state of emergency, so all buses were running for free. Unfortunately, at about 9:45, when the radio reported that the power would be out for 2-5 more hours, everybody who had made it downtown to work decided to go home. An estimated 35,000 people who counted on some form of public transit to make it home were suddenly trying to cram into packed buses which were running on a reduced schedule. Many decided just to walk.

At 1:30, right before the power came back on, Janet and I observed buses, jam packed with people making their way to the residential districts.

Still, throughout all of this, Mayor Brown still insists that MUNI ran admirably. I believe that they certainly made the best of the hand they were dealt. But if this is how poorly they handled a simple power outage, I shudder to think what will happen after the next big earthquake.

While enjoying a meatball sandwich earlier today, I picked up a copy of this week’s SF Weekly, one of the city’s free weekly newspapers. The cover story happened to be on the real reason that MUNI service is so bad: the employment perks that MUNI employees receive. Did you know that these people are entitled to 7 days a year where they can wake up, decide that they don’t feel like working, and go back to sleep without even so much as a call to their supervisor, or anyone for that matter, to say that they’re not going to be at work? Not only that, but they also get 10 days a year where they are able to go into work late — late in this case meaning not the common 30 minutes or an hour or two, but being able to arrive at any time before their shift is over — again, without having to call anyone to say that they’ll be in late.

If that interesting little tidbit isn’t ludicrous enough, just remember that the public transportation workers in this city are the second-highest paid in the country, and get 13 sick days and up to four weeks of vacation per year on top of all those allowable absences. If none of these policies float the typical MUNI driver’s boat, they can always choose the slightly unethical, yet workable options of either cutting their bus runs short or calling in a false breakdown just to get home a little earlier. With all of those perks, you would think that a prompt, professional and efficient citywide public transportation system would result. But yet, we riders of public transportation are still standing idly at bus stops, watching the minutes tick by and planning how we’re going to explain today’s tardiness to our bosses because unfortunately for us, we don’t have the same extra-lenient, union-backed lateness policies as the drivers do, and also unfortunately for us, we’ve used the “I was stuck on MUNI” excuse so may times that its beginning to sound like we’re crying wolf.

The truly shitty part of this whole scenario — aside from all the disgruntled MUNI riders — is that it’s probably never going to change, because if anyone does try to change it, MUNI workers, who are unionized, will simply go on strike and the city will come to a complete standstill. Unions were originally designed to protect the worker from a dangerous work environment, but now it seems that union members use the fact that they are able to go on strike to ensure themselves more and more often-undeserved perks. If unions keep being abused in this way, we’re going to need something to protect the rest of us.