Muni, BART & Getting the Fuck Around

Community Bands Together in Support of Dude Who Doesn't Even Know His Car Has Been Smashed Yet

Around 2am the other night, some madman came barreling down Capp Street, tires a' screeching, slamming into what sounded like no fewer than countless cars.  This was the scene of one collision, with much of its plastic paneling on the ground.

But good samaritans were on the scene to call 911 and record plate numbers, bringing rightful justice to someone who clearly can't drive for shit.  And even better?

The vultures were there to swoop in and offer up their bone-picking services.

(I also had the exact same thing happen to my old car on the same block of Capp in the middle of the night years ago.  Only no one was there to record the plate number, thus sticking my insurance company with the $2,700 repair bill.  I ditched that damn car two weeks later, leaving only to worry about bike thieves and shit drivers turning my personage into a hood ornament.)

Intrepid Researcher Sets Out to Determine Which is Better: Muni or BART

We Built This City is amidst an experience to figure out which mode of transportation is best to drag you from the Mission to downtown.  So far, things aren't looking good for Muni:

Travel time: BART 7 minutes, Muni OH MY GOD AM I GOING TO GET THERE BEFORE LUNCH?* Winner: BART

Number of blond chicks talking on their cellphones: BART: 0, Muni: 2. Winner: BART

Sunshine/scenery experienced during ride: BART: 0, Muni: The whole way. Winner: Muni

Number of jerks taking up more than one seat: BART: 2, Muni: 9 (counted the guy sleeping across 4 seats as 3). Winner: BART

Number of people in close proximity to me who seemed like they might be carrying bird flu: BART: 0, Muni: 70% of the people on the bus. Winner: BART

Geez.  Why don't we just tear up Muni already and reinvest all that money into a cycling program?  If we took their $780m annual budget and, like, divided it up among SF's 805k people, everyone could buy fancy new Public Bike every year and have enough money leftover for an Instagram-enabled device.

[More stats over at WBTC]

Tums Deploys Risky New Marketing Strategy Aimed at Schlong Gobblers

I googled around for this new “Cum Tums” product and found a bunch of things that made me kinda uncomfortable, so I'm not really sure what Tums is pitching with this new Muni advertising campaign.  I think it has something to do with heartburn, denigrating gender stereotypes, and calcium deficiency.  Also, my googling leads me to recommend that you don't try to fit one of these chalky discs in your urethra.

Have a lovely commute home!

[Photo by Muni Diaries]

BART Bidding Showdown: French Speaking Companies Battle Over Whose Product Is The Most "American"; Winner To Be Decided Upon Tomorrow

Pic via hunter1828.

I don't think anyone could have initially complained when BART announced a “Buy American” policy for bids on their new fleet of future rail cars.  But as disappointed as we all were to find out this futuristic fleet didn't include hover trains with robot conductors, I think we were even more disappointed to find out that the “Buy American” policy was really just rhetoric. Granted, our nation's crumbling industrial capacity and our general cultural disdain for public transportation systems are really to blame; there simply just aren't any US companies that currently build rail cars.

So with no US companies to step up, BART instead took bids from three foreign companies who each committed to meeting the guidelines of their “Buy American” policy. Turns out that this policy only really requires that just 60% of the materials used in the new BART fleet be manufactured in the United States. On top of that, every single one of the foreign bidders plans to do their American manufacturing on the East Coast, ensuring that virtually none of the $2.5 billion dollars will be spent creating jobs in California.

Last month, BART officials declared their findings after an extensive study of each of the three bids. South Korean Rotem (a Hyundai subsidiary) was by far the least favored. Instead, it came down to a pretty close finish between French Canadian Bombardier and France's Alstom.  On April 23rd, BART declared their support for Bombardier (which for obvious reasons, they like to refer to as a “North American” company instead of just calling them Canadian), which BART will likely vote in as the winner at a public meeting tomorrow morning at 9am (yeah, that's in 12 hours, cause I know you're totes gonna read this tonight and change your morning plans). 

Critics are crying foul because the “North America” Bombadier has apparently struggled to come up with a BART plan that will use just 66% US sourced parts. Also, Chicago's Bombadier built fleet of rail cars were apparently made with defective Chinese parts that recently forced replacements in all 775 of Chicago's trains and a complete recall and loss of 54 of those trains. 

By now, you've probably heard that really annoying, cheesy radio ad advocating for a “BART for America”. These ads are being funded by interests supporting the Alstom bid, who apprently submitted a plan to use 95% of US sourced materials for only about 12% more cost than Bombardier's bid, which still below the total project price tag of $2.5 billion. Unions are backing the last ditch effort to push BART towards the Alstom bid, and if you care enough to make a fuss and maybe create a few more manufacturing jobs in South Carolina or whatever, you too can show to the BART Board of Directors Hearing at 9am tomorrow morning and yell at people who aren't listening and have already made up their mind!

'MERICA! 

Tomorrow, May 10th @ 9am: BART Board Room in Kaiser Center, 20th Street Mall, Third Floor, 344 20th St., Oakland, CA.

Future trains brought to you by the metric system and French Fries. Pic via BART.

An Open Letter to Kixeye

Dear Kixeye,

I am writing you regarding your the advertisements that you have elected to put on the side of every BART and Muni car in the Bay Area. You know the one—the one with the wolf? And its mouth is open? And it's shouting “WORK AT KIXEYE / BE AWESOMER.” You know the ones.

Yes! Those.

First of all, congratulations. Congratulations on pioneering the exciting new frontier of memevertising. In this frantic and confusing age of holographic dead people and glasses that teach us to play ukelele, it's hard to break through to your average mama-grizzlybear consumer. BUT YOU DID IT! You said, “let's take jokes from the internet and use them to get people to come work at our startup!” A week and a half later, your very well-conceived ads were gracing every Muni bus, light rail train, and BART train in the city, extending an invitation to tens of thousands of commuters to seek employment at your startup.

But there are a few problems with your campaign, Kixeye. You see, when you exercise esoteric facets of internet culture to promote your recruitment campaign, you separate your potential applicants into two kinds groups of people:

  • Those who understand the reference.
  • Those who don't understand the reference.

The latter contingency are people who are just confused about why a wolf is shouting at them to work at your company and are nonplussed by your ploy to be “awesomer.” This ad is not for them. Clearly.

The former category, the small group of people that will have any idea what this joke is alluding to, will understand that you have very aggressively misappropriated this peculiar segment of internet humor. What you wanted to use was the “Courage Wolf” meme, where you do something that results in being successful by being courageous. But, Kixeye, the joke you made was created using the “Insanity Wolf” meme, where the joke is that you do something excessively insane or irrational (to quote, “Insanity wolf tells his viewers to rape, kill, and commit other acts of insanity”). What you basically ran is an ad telling people that they would have to be insane to work at Kixeye. I'm guessing that it's just a happy coincidence that anyone would have to be totally insane to want to work at a ding-dong startup that simultaneously boasts an obscure reference to something on every bus and light-rail in the city, but somehow misses the joke that nobody got in the first place. Maybe one would have to be insane to work at a company with whatever knuckleheads thought that it was acceptable to pollute the city with this ad.

Anyway, good luck in the coming business quarter!

Sincerely,

Sam Bartos

Occupy Calls Off Golden Gate Bridge May Day Protest, Forgets To Tell SFPD

“Whut u thinkin bout?”  “lol nothing, just bridge stuff.”
Pic via @ghostpickles

As if traffic wasn't already bad enough with people being minorly freaked out by the new Doyle Drive on-ramp this week, the Golden Gate Bridge was backed up to the gills this morning with drivers rubber necking the hell out of a massive 120+ strong SFPD presence, who were protecting the bridge and tunnel folks mainline commute from the likes of two (yes, 2 of them!) friendly looking Larkspur Ferry Boat teamsters wearing tweed suit jackets and brandishing picket signs. 

It seems that nobody remembered to inform the SFPD that Occupy had canceled their planned May Day protest of the bridge. Instead, the only people who showed up to practice some very civilly obedient protesting were a pair of Larkspur Golden Gate Ferry employees, who were on strike this morning, adding even more cars to the Marin - SF commute traffic jam. While most of the riot helmet and zip-tie carrying officers were concentrated on the Presidio side of the bridge, there were upwards of a hundred of them spaced out strategically every few hundred feet on both sides of the bridge, in groups of two to ten. 

No, seriously. It was just these two gentlemen vs 120+ riot cops. 
Pic via @hobostew

Instead of guarding against a protest that would have derailed the morning traffic flow, the SFPD (PS: why is the SFPD alone responsible for barricading the bridge to 'protect' Marin County from Occupy's 'vandals and hooligans'? Can't they send a few cops and deputies of their own?) and their unnecessary paramilitary presence on the Golden Gate Bridge only served to further fuck traffic up the ass. People tend to slow down and look when there's an invading army just 'hanging out' and “paTROLLING” on their commute route with no visible reason for them to be there.

On the up side, I think it's safe say that no one will be committing suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge today.

San Francisco Municipal Derailway

Muni is the one local institution that all San Francicans love to hate. Frankly that hate is rarely justified; most of the time Muni gets you where you're going in one piece for a mere two bucks. But every now and then, things do go very, very wrong on Muni. Hour-long delays, collisions, drivers asleep at the wheel, unruly passengers… I could go on and on. Believe me.

YouTuber PaperModelPlane sums up some of the many ways Muni has failed recently. His video is backed by a fun-yet-quirky Werner Tautz soundtrack that adds a touch of Johnny Depp-style zaniness to Muni's worst moments. (I kept expecting a Bob Saget voiceover.)

The video provides some cathartic humor to some frustrating memories. Remember the time those two Muni Metro cars collided at West Portal? Or when that bus chopped down out a fire hydrant? Or any of the recent times Muni derailed a train? There's no question these types of accidents have been too frequent.

But is the video unfair, or is this all par for the course? As one YouTube commenter succinctly put it, “Anything looks bad when you compile all the horrible mistakes it makes on a daily basis.”

Muni Diaries 4th Blog Bday Means Free Margaritas and Dancing and Other Nonsense Tonight @ Make-Out Room

The title says all that really matters (free margaritas, hello), but here's the complete low-down:

Get down with your fellow riders and celebrate life on the bus!
*Jam to 90s hip hop courtesy of DJ SMA of DEBASER.
* Free el Jimador margaritas!
* Look sharp and hop into the Orange Photography photo booth.
* Munch on free 4505 Meats chicharrones while supplies last.
* All attendees are entered to win prizes from Good Vibrations and Timbuk2
* The Chairman Bao truck will be parked in front of the Make-Out Room! Can you say pork belly?

Well, that sounds like a fine way to start off Saturday night.  6-9pm @ Make-Out Room.  Happy blog bday, Muni Diaries!

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