Muni's poor performance and its economic impact (San Francisco: 2013, how much)

[jade408]

Ever wonder how much poor Muni infrastructure costs the economy?

Neglecting Muni Costs the Economy at Least $50 Million Per Year | Streetsblog San Francisco

Here are some helpful stats:

• Muni vehicles have only logged a 58.7 percent on-time performance. Perhaps worse yet, nearly 20 percent of all vehicles are showing up with “gaps” of five minutes or more than the scheduled time between buses or trains;

• The system has had enough electric buses to meet peak weekday service only 64 percent of the time. It has had enough trains to do so only 33 percent of the time. In April, Muni only had enough trains to meet peak weekday service 9 percent of the time. That’d be two of the 22 weekdays in April;

• There have been 216 line delays of 10 minutes or greater (and God knows how many of up to nine minutes). On any given day, an average of 181 vehicles are unavailable to carry passengers. Last month, those passengers experienced 172,195 hours of delays. So, yes, in April, Muni riders cooled their heels for a cumulative 19 years and eight months.

Oh, and Muni delays cost commuters cumulatively about 19 years worth of time. Oh that's just for April of this year.

[DMenscha]

Reminds me of the study showing how many hours of time were wasted by waiting for MS Windows to boot up.

[jade408]

Originally Posted by DMenscha

Reminds me of the study showing how many hours of time were wasted by waiting for MS Windows to boot up.

LOL. My work computer is soo slow. I waste 1 hour per day waiting.

[mayorhaggar]

No worries, your tech zombie elites are taken care of.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...-san-francisco

[mistercommuter]

Originally Posted by mayorhaggar

No worries, your tech zombie elites are taken care of.

How wealth of Silicon Valley's tech elite created a world apart | Technology | The Observer

ouch, its the 19th century all over again.. we're a society of have and have-nots

back to topic, muni's inefficiency is no surprise and is probably more symbolic of the city's government and its services as a whole than we can comprehend

[ccm123]

Not to mention all of the lost revenue by passengers getting a free ride, by boarding through the backdoor and bypassing the Clipper Card scanner.

[mayorhaggar]

What I never understood was why the Bay Area as a whole just doesn't really care whether the average worker can get to work on time or not. Seems like it would be very disruptive to an employer (especially small businesses) every time an employee (or multiple employees) are stuck on Muni or BART for several hours when they need to be at work. And this happens ALL THE DAMN TIME, especially with Muni, not just once or twice a year. But there's just zero communication between anyone who could get anything done, and it doesn't seem like SF's elite puts in any effort to get Muni or BART to be more reliable. Other major cities would never tolerate such a flaky transit system, but SF and the greater Bay Area sure do.

So really I'm not surprised that the self-absorbed tech industry said "screw it" and started running their own shuttles rather than dealing with rehabilitating a diseased entity like Muni or BART. Only they have the money to do that, but overall it's definitely a pretty sad state of affairs if the Bay Area is so dysfunctional that that's supposed to be a solution. Not everyone works in tech, and most tech firms aren't big enough to run a shuttle. It's insane how wealthy and profitable the Bay Area continues to be when in a lot of ways it's run like a third world country.

[SunDevil1212]

Originally Posted by mayorhaggar

So really I'm not surprised that the self-absorbed tech industry said "screw it" and started running their own shuttles rather than dealing with rehabilitating a diseased entity like Muni or BART. Only they have the money to do that, but overall it's definitely a pretty sad state of affairs if the Bay Area is so dysfunctional that that's supposed to be a solution. Not everyone works in tech, and most tech firms aren't big enough to run a shuttle. It's insane how wealthy and profitable the Bay Area continues to be when in a lot of ways it's run like a third world country.

Are you really suggesting it is the responsibility of the tech industry, not local governments, to rehabilitate the public transportation system?? C'mon, man. If anything, they are doing us a favor running their private shuttles by taking cars off the street, freeing capacity on clogged Muni busses, and reducing carbon emissions of employees that would be driving separate cars if shuttles were not an option.

Blame lies squarely with the local governments here. MUNI couldn't manage its way out of a wet paper bag, and they are not held accountable.

[mayorhaggar]

Originally Posted by SunDevil1212

Are you really suggesting it is the responsibility of the tech industry, not local governments, to rehabilitate the public transportation system?? C'mon, man. If anything, they are doing us a favor running their private shuttles by taking cars off the street, freeing capacity on clogged Muni busses, and reducing carbon emissions of employees that would be driving separate cars if shuttles were not an option.

Blame lies squarely with the local governments here. MUNI couldn't manage its way out of a wet paper bag, and they are not held accountable.

It's the responsibility of the whole Bay Area to provide people with a reliable way to get to work. The government, tech companies, non-tech companies, voters, etc. But politics in the Bay Area is just completely dysfunctional. When I lived in Chicago, not only was the CTA way more reliable than Muni, but there was a sense that the city as a whole took pride in making sure the CTA was reliable in the first place. In the Bay Area people ***** and moan about Muni but never actually do anything about it, but it's completely understandable. Nobody wants to give Muni more money because Muni already has a pretty huge budget and does a completely crap job of providing service. Why throw more money at it?

And the IT industry has a lot of clout...probably too much clout, really, considering how few people each tech firm employs. If Twitter can, on its own, get a big sweetheart tax deal from SF, you'd think all the big tech firms in and around SF could band together to pressure Muni to stop being lame. But they're smarter than that and did an end run with their shuttles...but do firms in SF provide shuttles from the burbs into SF? Or do their employees have to sweat and suffer on the 14L just like all the Salvadoreans riding to work at tacquerias? Probably the latter.

IMO just burn Muni to the ground, sell off all its buses and crappy light rail trains to the third world where they belong, and build a totally new organization that isn't just an employment scheme. Until that happens, the Bay Area will resemble LA more and more.

[drewpie]

The only way to improve Muni service is to take on the unions, because it is an employment scheme for marginalized SF residents and there is no accountability. Even if the IT firms and dotcoms were to assume the burden of civilizing Muni, they would run into a buzzsaw when they took on public sector unions.

Essentially that is the tech shuttle solution - it's not that the _buses_ are some huge advantage over muni, it's that they have better drivers and more reliable service because they hire at will employees.