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No va...

It's traditional to christen a ship with a bottle of champagne. Not so with a Muni bus. Smashing bottles is a no-no, as is foamy, yellow liquid on the amenities.

Our city family today announced the introduction of 62 new biodiesel-electric hybrid buses, touting the graffiti-resistant surfaces and ease with which unwelcome moisture could be wiped away. You gotta admit, it's a handsome bus.

Then everyone loaded into the vehicle for a ride to City Hall. And, wouldn't you know it, the sucker didn't start.

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Jim Herd

We'd have gotten away to our stop if it wasn't for you meddling kids!

Back in the primordial days -- 1996 or so -- young, daredevil Muni riders devised a way to satiate their thrill-seeking urges, and do so on the cheap.

On the electric buses of the era, a pair of non-conducting wires descended down the back of the vehicle. They were spooled around a pair of dish-sized objects resembling the bells you'd see on a schoolhouse wall, which were mounted about a shoulder's length apart. Buses had a large rear bumper.

You can see where this is going; it'd be hard to design a more natural hand-and foothold. "We used to call it 'Coasting,'" recalls LaRon Mayfield. He and his younger brother Karim lived on Central but hung out in the Fillmore. So they'd snag a free ride on the back of the 5-Fulton.

The so-called "fad" of young people forcing open the back doors of Muni buses in motion -- "riding the surf" in the parlance of our times -- didn't resonate with Mayfield. Sure, dangling off the back of a bus is dangerous -- but it's also utilitarian. "We just wanted a free ride up that hill."

"Riding the surf" splashed across the pages of both dailies and was described as a "fad" and "trend" -- despite no one having yet located a single video of said moronic activity on YouTube.

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Crowd more passengers in! BART's got bills to pay...

The news that erstwhile BART general manager Dorthy Dugger remains the rail service's highest-paid employee -- despite being offboarded by BART's board of directors in 2011 -- is beguiling.

Sadly, it fits a pattern. Exceedingly well-paid executives have a tendency to remain the fattest cats at public agencies, even after they've been shown the door. Much the same happened after former Muni boss Nat Ford stepped down in June 2011. In that year, Ford took home more money than any other San Francisco employee with a total pay of $567,595.

Ford's $384,000 severance payment likely staved off even costlier litigation. But, by that point, the bus was out of the barn; this serves as yet another example of the questionable practice of awarding CEOs of public entities with massive, guaranteed contracts. Ford was jettisoned with money on the meter, so to speak. But not nearly as much money as Dugger.

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And there goes your morning...

A major BART inconvenience creates ripples -- not so much like a smooth pebble tossed in a pristine pond but a foul object deposited into a stagnant puddle.

Muni begins to resemble a large sardine can, with our own bodily fluids taking on the role served by olive oil, cottonseed oil, or vegetable oil in the realm of canned fish. Cars flood the roads. Bicyclists are menaced. The Seventh Seal is opened and, lo, something like a great mountain burning with fire is thrown in the sea, and a third of the sea becomes blood.

It can ruin your morning.

San Franciscans are all too familiar with the ramifications of transit failures. What boggles the mind a bit more is the scenario that led to it in the first place. How could two maintenance vehicles colliding take out 380 feet of track?

See Also: Expect Major BART Delays

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Garbage bags on the high-voltage wires! Adventures in Muni!

Woody Allen pithily noted that 80 percent of life is just showing up. Statistics presented during yesterday's transit hearing indicate that, on many days, Muni has trouble doing even that.

In April, Muni was able to provide the necessary number of light-rail vehicles to meet demand on only two of 22 weekdays.

Those kind of statistics are easy to understand (as was Muni's 0 percent score in the same category in December of 2012). But page after heaping page of various combinations of acronyms and numbers obscure other metrics used to measure progress -- or lack thereof.

One of these is the "Mean Distance Between Failure" (MDBF), a number derived by dividing the number of miles a form of public transit drives by the number of roadcalls required to keep it going. Judging by the data presented by Muni yesterday -- and in the past -- is Muni getting better or worse here?

The answer, naturally, is "yes."

See Also: Muni Presents Hideous Numbers at Transit Hearing

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Jim Herd

Par for the course

Audit: In April, Muni riders were delayed for a cumulative 19 years and eight months.

There is no metric to quantify the experience of realizing your pants are now sticky after having sat on Muni. But the agency is doing everything it can to produce sticky numbers of a different sort.

At a 1 p.m. hearing taking place this very moment during the Board of Supervisors  Land Use & Economic Development Committee, Muni officials will present the first of a series of quarterly reports on the state of the city's transit service. And while the report -- which you can read here -- is being delivered on time, there's a damn good chance your bus won't be.

This audit, undertaken at the behest of Supervisor Scott Wiener, is chock-full-o' horrifying statistics relating to time and money -- specifically, the former that riders are losing and the latter it will take to remedy the former.

To wit, since July:

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Joe Eskenazi

Eat oatmeal on the train when you "travel like a local"

A cheery publication aimed at visitors to our fair city encouraging them to "travel like a local" on public transit is a massive softball waiting to be belted over the fence and deep, deep into the bleachers. 
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Jim Herd

Cash money!

To date, Muni has opted to surrender $15,780 from four different runs of inflammatory ads demonizing Muslims. Now Supervisor Scott Wiener, working with the Jewish Community Relations Council has asked the transit agency to do the same with $5,030 it pocketed after accepting bus ads labeling Israel an apartheid state and featuring an image of a silhouetted Israeli soldier leveling a rifle at a child.

Wiener and five board colleagues yesterday sent a brief letter -- which you can read here -- to Muni director Ed Reiskin and the agency's board complaining of a double standard, and requesting the apartheid money be disgorged. Muni spokesman Paul Rose tells us, however, that "there is no plan for these funds to be transferred."

This brings up an interesting point: Muni does not have a quantifiable process to determine when to keep or surrender controversial ad money. The agency, Wiener says, "hasn't articulated a distinction" between the anti-Muslim and anti-Israel bus ads.

See Also: Muni "Savages" "Jihad" Etc. Battling Mideast Bus Ads Fund Pending Study

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This train is so old you'd think it was going to Woodstock

If you're still recovering from the fact you had to dip into your savings to see the Rolling Stones play in San Francisco earlier this month, well consider yourself lucky that you didn't have to shell out even more money for your ride to the show.

Supervisor Scott Wiener today is planning to ask his colleagues to consider a new plan to tack on extra fees for anyone who is buying a ticket to a sporting event, concert, or any other major event. Those extra fees would go toward Muni.

First step is to have the controller assess this transit surcharge, looking at a range of fees that would generate more money for Muni which badly needs the cash to replace the light-rail vehicles that are getting kinda dumpy.

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Audrey Fukuman

Drill, baby, drill!

Federal officials "concerned that it has taken the Central Subway Project so long to address this serious deficiency."

If time is, indeed, money, the Central Subway project is in double trouble.

A recent report by an overseer monitoring the $1.6 billion federally funded project laments that the controversial subway line is at risk of falling well short of Federal Transportation Administration minimums for both surplus time and money.

Ominously, the Project Management Oversight Contractor further highlighted a potential drain of even more time and money at the nascent Union Square/Market Street Station. Construction work there initiated in January "has progressed very slowly," reads an April report from the "PMOC" placed by the feds to oversee the Central Subway project.

Construction crews are "having great difficulties installing the headwall piles." Only six of 46 were completed in the project's first three months; at that pace installing the other 40 will stretch until June of next year. This project is scheduled for completion nine months prior to then, in September 2013 -- and must be completed before the arrival of the first tunnel-boring machine, which is slated for November.

These delays are chalked up to "equipment breakdowns, casing segment shearing, and the inability to achieve the verticality required by the contract." In layman's terms, that last item essentially means the 4-foot diameter, 150-foot deep piles aren't going in straight enough. "If the contractor does not significantly increase pile production, the project may incur delay costs," notes the report.

That's never good news. Especially when so much of this 12-page report is dedicated to hammering home the point that this project, scheduled for completion in 2018, is already stretched with regards to contingencies.

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