Thursday, April 12, 2007

The T-errible Line

As all the locals should know by now, MUNI opened its T-Line that runs from Castro Station to who knows where. Unfortunately, the T does not stand for punctual, clean, safe, reliable, or comfortable. But it does stand for The-thing-that's-making-MUNI-go-from-bad-to-worse. The underground buses have not been nice to commuters this past week. The problem that everyone is complaining about is the delays. Well, someone is always complaining about delays but people have been extraordinarily vocal about it this week.

So today at the bus station, MUNI agents were handing out fliers with a letter from the chief of MUNI. His name is Nate Ford or something or rather. I wonder if his job description is to be a jerk and make people mad. Because if it is, he's doing one bang up job! So this letter he signed apologizes to riders about the delays and makes bogus statements about how they're working around the clock to fix the problem.

The way I look at, the answer is simple. Take away the T-line. How difficult is that, right? Sure, the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on this new line would be wasted. And the twenty plus years it took to plan this project would also go down the drain. But I don't care. At least I wouldn't be 30 minutes late to work every day.

Well, to be fair, I'm looking at MUNI's side of the story and trying to sympathize with them. After all, the real problem might not be the buses. I think the problem could be that people expect too much from a simple bus ride. Could expectations of our humble transit system be too high? Maybe. I mean why should someone expect the buses to be on schedule? It's not like people actually like to go to work anyway. And what's the big deal with being packed in like sardines and having no room to move or breathe? Some people like it a little cozy... even it means being sandwiched between two portly ladies.

Yeah, that's probably it. People are just too spoiled here.