“When Did Jon Become an Angry Old Man?”

Every time I try to use public transportation in San Francisco.

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Apparently, San Francisco MUNI hasn’t heard of credit cards or debit cards. Or ridden the New York subway where I can choose how much or little I’d like to put on my MTA card.

In a city that regards itself proudly as progressive, the consistently massive failure of the city to address the number one issue facing anyone in the city who needs to get around: MUNI blows. I’ve written about it before. I’ve ranted. I’ve lived in San Francisco. It’s unfriendly to everyone, but visitors in particular. I know it’s cool to look down your nose at the “others” intruding your “space”. Your misguided xenophobic and slightly aristocratic hatred of people who come to your city for business or vacation I can deal with. A city run by liberals who helped move legal gay marriage forward is awesome. Now fix your public transportation.

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Lived this as a resident far too many days.

As I wrote before, compare San Francisco’s mass transit to any other major urban center. The only city worse than San Francisco is Los Angeles. BART is better than MUNI. Caltrain is better than MUNI. My ass is better than MUNI.

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No coins. Fast Pass only. Fast Pass is a monthly pass. They only sell them for about 3 days a month and you can only get them for the next month if you remember that you have to buy early.

With a city so full of smart people, geeks, user experience experts and technologists why is MUNI so horrible?

I’m actively trying to reduce my carbon footprint when I travel (I know that offsetting airplane exhaust is futile, but still, I try) and a city run by supposed liberals is making it next to impossible. I took so many cabs this weekend. Not a single one of them was a hybrid or alternative fuel vehicle.

This is nothing short of a disgrace for anybody who calls themselves progressive.

p.s. alternative answer to question posed in title: “Coco.”

p.p.s. apologies to the kind people who had a car and drove us a couple of times. You are awesome.

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  • jck

    I have to brag on Boston’s mass transit system. The T (MBTA) has a comprehensive range of buses, underground buses (they drive above and in bus tunnels underground—no traffic!), subway trains, trolleys, commuter rail trains and water ferries and boats….you can pretty much get anywhere here. Though in 2007 we went to paper and plastic CharlieCards over tokens, even buying tokens was fairly easy with manned booths, though they only took cash, but you could get your monthly pass at various subway sales offices or a bunch of retail stores on the first 5 and last 5 …cash, ATM card or charge. You can also buy your monthly pass/CharlieCard on the internet or you can have it automatically charged and sent to you each month. (CharlieCard: From the Kingston Trio’s 1959 hit song “Charlie On The M.T.A.” (Mass Transit Authority now Mass Bay Transit Authority http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CharlieCard )

    Now that we’ve abandoned tokens, to buy tickets we have computerized machines that accept cash (and give change), ATM cards and charge cards. You can reload your CharlieCard with cash on any bus and most trolleys or at 90% of subway terminals. CharlieCards don’t have to be swiped either…you can just leave it in your wallet or purse and it reads right through–a definite time saver. On buses you get an automatic transfer for a connecting bus put right onto your card that lasts for a limited amount of time that day and then expires. You get a discounted fare for getting a free CharlieCard and reloading it with cash as opposed to buying a paper ticket each day. At the subway vending machines, limited sales offices and a bunch of retail stores in various cities, you can still buy your monthly CharlieCard pass on the last 5 days and the first 5 days of each month. At the vending machines you can always buy an all day pass for $9 which entitles you unlimited buses, subways, trolleys, ferries and limited commuter rail stops and $15 for a weekly pass…great for visitors. Monthly passes range from $50-$198 depending on how many different bus/train lines you want included. The subway and trolleys go by color,,,orange, green, red, blue and purple lines…and it is very easy to figure out how to transfer to get where you’re going. There is also a website that tells you which buses and trains to take if you put in your destination). It is true that service can be interrupted by switching problems or a disabled train more times than we’d like, but we are an impatient people and it is not nearly as often as riders would have you believe…though it may SEEM like a lot when you ride it 2 or more times a day! If they were honest, people would have to say that on a daily basis it’s a pretty smooth running system. (And no, I don’t work for the T but have been riding it for over 30 years!)

  • http://www.flickr.com/photos/minxlj minxlj

    I never had a problem with MUNI or San Francisco’s other transit systems both times I’ve visited, and the second time I was there for 2 weeks. Still, I’m used to England’s public transport system so anything would be an improvement, frankly!

    I thought all public service vehicles in SF were electric? I’m sure I read that somewhere…anyway it’s a shame about the taxis not being like that, it would again say something positive for SF and would be a good thing, surely.

  • kgowen725

    Try Septa, in Philadelphia. You’ve never seen a worse public trans system, in my opinion.

  • erin

    I feel your pain and I’m here to offer a theory. I live in Seattle, another liberal, progressive town and we have similar issues with public transportation.

    As an example, they had this monorail idea that they tried to implement by heavily taxing yearly car registrations. My car went from 100 bucks to 600 bucks. That’s pretty ouchie. Anyway, they never did reach a consensus and wound up wasting all the monorail tax money on nothing. They called the whole thing off and (finally) removed the tax.

    The reason this happened, in my east coast opinion, is because people strive to reach consensus here. It is nearly impossible to get EVERYONE to agree and when you feel it necessary to make everyone’s opinion important, you never reach a decision.

    I see it all the time at my place of work, too. We have 15 meetings about something that could have been decided in two. There is a reason things get done faster and often better back east… people are more aggressive. Sometimes the decision that is pushed through doesn’t work out, but hey, at least a decision was made.

    Instead, those of us doomed to live in liberal-thinking, consensus-driven cities are stuck with no decisions, ever.

    (Don’t even get me started on the two-story viaduct we have here that is in serious need of replacement. The city won’t admit it, but it’s dangerous. They’ve been quietly making repairs for years now. There have been discussions about whether to tear it down and rebuild it or to tear it down and leave it down, but you want to know when the decision will be made? When the next earthquake knocks it down, probably killing a lot of people. I’m so not kidding either.)

    Thanks for listening to my rant!

  • calliope

    Yeah. MUNI is not so great for visitors. I LOVE it for me, living here. The monthly fastpass is CHEAP and really convenient now that you can buy it online. And if you don’t have a pass, and if you have figured out how it works, MUNI can actually be really convenient too–you pay $1.50 for a transfer and often the transfer is valid for hours. It’s pretty great. I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere where the public transit is so inexpensive. BART is overpriced, though, in my opinion.

    I do think the entire Bay Area needs to work on the transit system. It needs to be more unified, less cash based, and more accessible to all. It’s really, really hard to live here without a car. I have to leave for work about an hour early every day, even though the journey should only be 20 minutes at most by bus, because it’s so unpredictable when the bus will come and what the traffic will be like. But I can’t imagine it would be all that much more convenient to have a car, because parking is hard to find and prices are exorbitant, and rush hour traffic is a nightmare.

    What they really need to do is improve the public transit bay-wide and then TAX drivers a LOT so people stop driving. Really, there shouldn’t be any need to drive in a metro area like here. But because the transit system is so unreliable…

    Good news is they are moving to a bay-wide TransLink program, so you get a debit-card-like thing that will work on BART, ACtransit in berkeley/oakland, and SF MUNI. So you won’t have to carry cash, won’t have to go to one of the few locations on one of the few days of the month to get a muni pass, and can even get it online and re-load it online. Pretty cool.

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