The Magical MUNI tour kicks off!

IF YOU GO: Snacks will be served, with shouting to follow.
By Benjamin Wachs
Julie, a manager with the Transit Effectiveness Project, points to a cluster of red lines on a white background and her head hangs, just a little. This travel speed map “is one of our most depressing maps,” she admits. It shows that most heavily used MUNI buses travel at less than 6 miles an hour.
There’s no better example of why the system has to change than slow buses – except for the buses that don’t show up at all. There are plenty of those, too.
The people in the audience nod patiently. They know that. They’re ordinary San Franciscans, who take public transit all the time. They are not impressed by the TEP staff’s assurance that “We’re been riding the buses and trains ourselves” to come up with plans to fix MUNI. (How very brave of you). But they’re also a patient crowd. In general, they support the idea of a MUNI overhaul, don’t have any concerns about focusing on express routes, and think that dedicated bus lanes and cracking down on double-parking is all for the good. That’s not their issue. Instead, they’re waiting patiently, each of them, for a chance to say the one thing they’ve been carrying with them all week.
YOU WANT TO CUT THE 36? HOW DARE YOU TRY TO CUT THE 36!
LEAVE THE 66 QUINTARA ALONE!
OLD PEOPLE WILL HAVE TO WALK UP HILL! IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT?
Like an earthquake, these passionate bullet points rumble unpredictably beneath the surface of the meeting. At some point, they’re going to reach the top. The question is: how destructive will they be?
If the very first “community meeting” about the Transit Effectiveness Project – a proposed massive 5 year overhaul of MUNI – is heavily structured and organized from the top down, that’s because organizers know that any meeting about MUNI is, right from the get go, about damage control.
Give the People what the People say the People want
There’s something a little odd about the premise of these meetings, the first of which was held Saturday at the West Portal Elementary School. MUNI is presenting its proposed changes to the public … while claiming that it’s doing exactly what the public told it to. They never mention transit experts consulted, best practices that are being proposed, or successful transit systems they’re modeling themselves after: instead, they tell the members of the public how well the public was surveyed.
That is to say, the purpose of these meetings is to get our opinions of the plan that was already based on meetings to get our opinions.











This time it was a man believed to be 50 to 70-years-old in the Western Addition. He was hit yesterday by a 

