Oh, and also to make local homeowners happy. Well, to make some of them happy anyway.
Check it, the stops near Central Avenue,* Broderick, and Scott are all on the chopping block:
Click to expand
You can try to go down to the public hearing on May 18th, 2012, but it won’t matter – MUNI’s already decided to do this.
Will these changes make MUNI suck less?
Sure
Do I approve?
Sure, why not?
*Avenue? You’re no wider than any other street in the nabe. All right all right, Central, you’re an “avenue.” Keep on telling yourself that, but the nearby streets are all laughing at you.
*”Spur?” I love it. Oh yeah, that’s right. It doesn’t go as far north as it should, or as far south neither. And it’s too deep. Maybe it just doesn’t make sense, as things stand now, except as a political payoff.
“Mayoral candidate, and Reset San Francisco Founder, Phil Ting will hold eight Muni town halls in four weeks to engage residents around the vital issue of making public transportation faster and more reliable.
“If the politicians and the policy makers could do it alone, Muni would already work. The people need to be engaged at every level to help find the best ideas and to hold the city accountable for change,” Ting said.
Ting’s first Muni Town Hall will be Thursday, September 29 at 6:30pm focused on improving the 38 Geary.
Ting will review the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s Transit Effectiveness Project (TEP) and discuss how to implement it faster.
“The Transit Effectiveness Project is a good start to reducing our travel times and making Muni work better. But all San Franciscans need to be part of this conversation,” Phil Ting said. “The City doesn’t have the resources or budget for extensive community outreach, so Reset San Francisco is taking the first steps to engage residents to get involved and to participate in the discussion.”
“We want to work with the City to engage San Franciscans on this important issue,” Ting said. “The TEP will take 5 more years to implement, and at Reset San Francisco, we think we can tap into the community to maybe help speed up this process.”
“If we speed up our buses and streetcars by just 1 minute, the SFMTA would save over $20 million a year. And those funds could be spent on ways to ensure that our world-class city has world-class public transportation.”
Last August, Phil Ting hosted a Muni town hall with the Reset San Francisco community and transportation experts Tim Papandreou, Joel Ramos and Greg Dewar. Nearly 300 San Franciscans came to share their ideas and their priorities for Muni with the panelists and each other.
M Ocean View Thursday, October 20, 7pm West Portal Playground, 131 Lenox Way
1 California Saturday, October 22, 2:30pm San Francisco Public Library (Richmond), 351 9th Ave.
ABOUT RESET SAN FRANCISCO: Reset San Francisco is an offline and online community founded by San Francisco Assessor-Recorder and candidate for mayor Phil Ting. The community has already united more than 10,000 San Franciscans and given them the tools to learn about policy, debate ideas and make their voices heard at City Hall. The ResetSanFrancisco.org community uses web-based Government 2.0 tools to help its members connect with government, and it also organizes in-person forums to connect San Franciscans to each other and to help the community unite around solutions.”
The remaining stops got a bit of sprucing up last week, with red paint and what not:
Click to expand.
Of course there’s no shelter to replace the ones that got taken away, but you can’t have everything in Life, right? You can’t expect a minor bus line to have four stops just for itself within a 200 foot radius forever, right?
Here’s something to ponder – if 60-foot buses going down the street destroys the surrounding area, that means that all the other hoods in town with 60-foot buses have already been destroyed, right? So all you godforsaken souls in the Mission and the Richmond, well you’re dead but you just don’t know it. How can you tolerate subsisting in your non-charming non-village?
That’s the NIMBY mentality.
But, maybe the buses will roll and Life in the Cow Hollow will go on as before?
But let’s hear from today’s Union StreetNIMBYs themselves. Happy reading!
60 FEET-LONG MONSTER MUNI BUSES
THREATEN TO PUT SMALL UNION STREET INN OUT OF BUSINESS
A SF Muni proposal is currently in the works to establish a 291 feet long Bus Terminus at Union & Fillmore. This is to accommodate 60 feet long articulated buses which are planned for service on Union Street. This act of folly places the terminus at the very doorstep of the Union Street Inn, and could place the very existence of the jewel-like Inn in jeopardy.
Objections to the ill-conceived plan voiced by merchants of the Union Street Association at recent meetings were summarily dismissed, leaving the impression that the plan is a done deal. The proceedings were termed “farcical” by some merchants.
The impact on The Union Street Inn and other merchants in the area could be crippling. With the small inn already struggling to survive in a bruising economy it is inconceivable to think that Muni would even consider removing five revenue-earning meters directly outside the Inn in order to make way for a totally inappropriate, peace-disturbing terminus that would start operation at 5 am and continue throughout the day.
Closure of the award-winning Inn would not only be a tragedy, wrought by bureaucracy run amok, but would also result in a loss of $40,000 a year paid by the inn through the City Hotel Tax.
An appeal for intervention by Supervisor Alioto-Pier has, as yet, only elicited a polite formal response from a Legislative Assistant.
CONTACTS: David Coyle, Innkeeper, Union Street Inn, 2229 Union Street; Lesley Leonhardt, Union Street Merchants Assn.
Is the source of the idea of the CultureBus documented anywhere? Not that I’m aware of. Obviously, the whole program was highly redolent of the New York City “Culture Bus” that ran from 1973 to 1982, but who had the idea to revive CB here in San Francisco? Perhaps it doesn’t really matter.
Whether or not the CultureBus concept was forced upon MUNI, doesn’t MUNI have the right and obligation to tinker with the idea? Did MUNI do anything to alter the CultureBus program once it became obvious (I’d peg it at early October 2008) that the daily ridership was turning out to be extremely low? I mean something other than spewing the stereotypical platitudes you’d expect them to spew?
Here’s what MUNI did – it cut back service 66% in January and raised prices 43% in July. That’s it. Just how airtight were these unseen agreements made amongst the stakeholders? Nothing could be done? Srsly?
(So, it’s like the Great Helmsman, the Dear Leader appoints you manage the Yangtse River Watershed and then tells you to kill every damned songbird within a 500 mile radius - how would you respond? Here’s what you’d do, you’re a team player right? You’d execute the plan and then wait for millions to die, powerless to alter Fate. And then you’d say boy, that Great Leap Forward, boy, it just didn’t work out.)
Wouldn’t it have been interesting to try something different? Lower the price to $1.50 for the sole purpose of actually moving people about the City in light of the circumstances? Or just trying anything except the same old same old, month after month?
Oh well.
So there’s your albatross, Nat.
But that’s why you get paid the big bucks.
And as for you CultureBus, your pain is over, boy. Soon the Twitter birds will descend to lift you to Heaven.
Sleep! It is a gentle thing:
(In Elysium, there’ll be plenty of diesel and you’ll always be full of happy passengers.)
