Because the last startup with a dog avatar crushed it.

Look, we get it: Muni is pretty much a giant hollowed out piece of dogshit on wheels.  Its schedule is random, at best.  NextBus, a horror show.  It's crowded, smelly, sketchy, slow, socialist, impossible, insufferable, expensive, and people clip their toenails on it.  Being drunk is pretty much a prerequisite for boarding.  Also, it doesn't have wifi and leather seats.

No one seems to know how to fix it.  It takes San Francisco 16 years to construct a single high-speed line, while Mexico City reinvents their entire bus system in three.  Willie “Da Mayor” Brown can do little more than joke about his fantastic ineptitude in fixing Muni.  And Scott Wiener still hasn't responded to my pleas to criminalize pedicures on the 14 Mission.

What can be done?

Meet Leap, the latest coddle libertarian startup that knows Muni's issues stems from our secret jealously of Google Buses:

Leap is a shuttle service for San Francisco commuters.

Leap is the best way to get to work. Our shuttles will take you downtown in the morning, and back home in the evening. Our first route, the Chestnut Express, services the Marina. We'll be adding more routes soon.

Promising “A Seat For Everyone,” a ride on Nu Muni will cost you $6 each way—assuming you own an iPhone and live on a profitable route.  Numi also only runs weekdays from “7:00 AM to 10:00 AM and from 4:00 PM to 7:00 PM,” because those are the times everyone needs to ride the bus. (Sorry granny on a fixed income.)

We reached out to Greg Dewar of the N-Judah Chronciles for some initial thoughts on this stunning disruption of public transit:

This is going to blow up for a few reasons:

1. Just because it's not a Muni bus doesn't mean it can't get stuck in the same traffic Muni does.

2. If this amplifies the already existing problem of private buses at Muni stops, you can better believe MTA will crack down on them.

3. Their base cost is very high if they aren't using public power (like Muni does and is the only one that can). [Ed: never mind increased pollution from not being electric.]

4. It can't replace Muni. It only makes sense for them to run on lines that produce the most riders. They're not going to have these things in West Portal. It'll be a downtown thing to a few neighborhoods at best and even then there are insurance issues and rights of way issues.

5. It'll get a shitload of free press, it'll start up, and it will fail because they can't serve the entire city AND beat Muni. At best I see this as a snooty bus “system” that will leave most people still stranded.

We love it.  Ayn Rand's libertarian fantasy world is finally taking root in San Francisco.  Paul Ryan for mayor anyone?

(Meanwhile:)

World's greatest muni driver now announcing we are stopped at a green light because of a commuter bus. #sfmuni #49

— The Tens (@thetens) May 29, 2013

[h/t Connie Hwong]

Because the San Francisco rental market is the fucking worst, one would-be mobile slumlord is hawking her sleeper van on Airbnb.

That's right, for just $520 a month (or $92 a night, if that's your sort of thing), you can call this cozy, street-level, rockin' one bedroom/personal Google shuttle your home.  Of course, there is no kitchen, closet, on-site parking, or place to crap (at least, legally)—and we're sure utilities will run a pretty penny—but it is only a third the cost of the city's immobile parking space-sized apartments.  So, you know, there's that.

Page describes her Stab City by the Bay home as such:

I have a 1990 Chevy Conversion van with only 45,000 miles. She runs great and has a cozy queen size van bed in the back and three captain's chairs, including the driver's. It has a clean record and gets pretty good gas mileage for a van.

The photos are verified by Airbnb.com, so you know the joke isn't on them, only us.

[Airbnb, via Reddit]

When future generations of American schoolchildren look back at 2012 in their history ebooks, San Francisco's greatest achievement will undoubtedly be remembered as Lyft's pink mustache—perhaps the most significant leap forward in automobile anthropomorphism since Lindsey Lohan sniffed her way inside Herbie the Love Bug back in 1969.  But we aren't living in 1969, my friends.  This is bronze age of iterative disruption, and Muni has taken Lyft's fist-bumpin' badge of whimsy and pivoted it into a sinister, alien-eyed autobus frontage.

That's right.  Behold the future of Muni: these are the new electrohybridfuturebuses you'll be spending your anxiety-filled commutes in for the next 10-15 years, and oh how evil they look.

But it's a marvelous improvement, really.  And when you consider the driver of said alien-eyed autobus won't welcome you with a fist-bump, but instead a glare and mumbled obscenity, pehaps Muni's newly personified face is a fitting representation the entire system.

[Photo by munidave | via Streetsblog]

Google Buses have been around for a while, but with the mobile boom raising rents and giving way to weird new semi-spiced fusion restaurants, they are suddenly BIG NEWS.  So big that the controversy surrounding them has leaped form humble stencils outside of coffeeshops to the likes of NY Mag.  And now the London Review of Books is getting in the mix with an essay by 30+ year San Franciscan Rebecca Solnit.

It's long and comprehensive, tackling more than I could possible summarize in an early morning blog post.  But it goes beyond the usual whine of rental costs and Those Damn Kids With Their Cellamaphones and tries to give the boom some historical context.  So rather than pick out some highlights, I'll just leave you with the first few paragraphs and encourage you to read on:

The buses roll up to San Francisco’s bus stops in the morning and evening, but they are unmarked, or nearly so, and not for the public. They have no signs or have discreet acronyms on the front windshield, and because they also have no rear doors they ingest and disgorge their passengers slowly, while the brightly lit funky orange public buses wait behind them. The luxury coach passengers ride for free and many take out their laptops and begin their work day on board; there is of course wifi. Most of them are gleaming white, with dark-tinted windows, like limousines, and some days I think of them as the spaceships on which our alien overlords have landed to rule over us.

Other days I think of them as the company buses by which the coal miners get deposited at the minehead, and the work schedule involved would make a pit owner feel at home. Silicon Valley has long been famous for its endless work hours, for sucking in the young for decades of sixty or seventy-hour weeks, and the much celebrated perks on many jobsites – nap rooms, chefs, gyms, laundry – are meant to make spending most of your life at work less hideous. The biotech industry is following the same game plan. There are hundreds of luxury buses serving mega-corporations down the peninsula, but we refer to them in the singular, as the Google Bus, and we – by which I mean people I know, people who’ve lived here a while, and mostly people who don’t work in the industry – talk about them a lot. Parisians probably talked about the Prussian army a lot too, in the day.

My brother says that the first time he saw one unload its riders he thought they were German tourists – neatly dressed, uncool, a little out of place, blinking in the light as they emerged from their pod. The tech workers, many of them new to the region, are mostly white or Asian male nerds in their twenties and thirties; you often hear that to be over fifty in that world is to be a fossil, and the two founders of Google (currently tied for 13th richest person on earth) are not yet forty.

Another friend of mine told me a story about the Apple bus from when he worked for Apple Inc. Once a driver went rogue, dropping off the majority of his passengers as intended at the main Apple campus, and then rolling on towards San Jose instead of stopping at the satellite location, but the passengers were tech people, so withdrawn from direct, abrupt, interventionary communications that they just sat there as he drove many miles past their worksite and eventually dumped them on the street in a slum south of the new power centre of the world. At that point, I think, they called headquarters: another, more obedient bus driver was dispatched. I told the story to another friend and we joked about whether they then texted headquarters to get the email addresses of the people sitting next to them: this is a culture that has created many new ways for us to contact one another and atrophied most of the old ones, notably speaking to the people around you. All these youngish people are on the Google Bus because they want to live in San Francisco, city of promenading and mingling, but they seem as likely to rub these things out as to participate in them.

Read on.