Muni is 100 years old. Too bad it won’t die | Hacker News Reader

Muni is 100 years old. Too bad it won’t die

pandodaily.com

12 pointsjamesjyu12 comments

> This is a tiny city, and you can walk from any one point to another in 45 minutes most of the time.

> But, back to walking. Anyone who is traveling in a North-South direction to commute (i.e. Marina to Downtown) knows that by the time the 30 or 45 bus gets to Chinatown, you can get out and walk faster, plus you don’t feel like a sardine. That walk is a no-brainer.

The author ignores anyone who finds walking difficult.

California's muni problems are not just because of "the Chinese"[1] but because of the baffling tax / road thing that got themselves into.

[1] I never thought that in 2012 I'd be saying "It's not the Chinese" in a comment about SF. :-\

Really now. He doesn't blame "the Chinese" as you would have us believe; he blames one particular Chinese.

> The Chinatown political machine ensures that they get the lion’s share of the benefits

That headline is bolded. Use of the word "they" suggests to me more than one leader.

Maybe it's just a cultural thing, (I'm in the UK) but this next paragraph feels weird, almost xenophobic. It's the kind of thing that only fringe politicians would say.

> But I’m sure that the camera shops, trinket stands, and street-side produce markets of Chinatown are the ones providing the city with most of its tax, jobs, and commerce income.

I will admit I've never experienced MUNI - I lived in the outskirts of the SF Bay for about a year, is all. But I am generally ill-disposed towards anyone who wants to kill public transit in a city.

See, I don't drive. I never learnt. And I don't want to spend all my money on cabs, no matter how I summon them. Good public transit helps the city; it gets the people who can't or won't drive or walk (too old to walk, too broke for a car, too tired after a long bike ride, hauling groceries, hauling suitcases home from the airport, wants some time to sit and think/hack rather than pay attention to driving or walking...) around to where they need to go.

Also his argument that it sucks because it's funded largely by parking tickets? Yah? So? This is not unique to SF, lots of public transit is funded by taxes on motorists of one kind or another. You wanna drive your personal car around and take up space on the road and in parking, you get to help the people who take the bus too.

His argument that driver pensions are bad doesn't earn him any more points with me either. I guess he'd rather see all those retired bus drivers working shitty Wal-Mart greeter jobs in their dotage or something?

The stuff about building new routes through Chinatown due to favors the mayor owes, I'll give him that. I dunno anythng about the politics in the city.

I feel conflicted that something like this shows up on hacker news. It's really only tenuously interesting to hackers by way of geographic coincidence and nothing else. A lot of hackers life in San Francisco, so something about San Francisco is interesting to hackers in San Francisco. However not all hackers live in San Francisco. In fact most live anywhere but san francisco.

Seems like a rant. Perhaps someone living in San Fransisco can confirm if it's really the case - I'm just a poor sod living in Australia, we have our own traffic and transportation issues.

Compared to Queensland transport Muni is absolutely fantastic! There are many modes of public transport and it's everywhere. It's only $2 to ride and it's rare that you wait more than 5min for a bus or light rail.

Other public transport in the bay area seems pretty good from my limited experience too. The Caltrain costs only $5 to ride from SF to Redwood City (about 50km). I haven't been further so I'm unsure how the price increases the further out you go. It also smells nice and has comfy chairs :).

Compared to Queensland, that is bliss - if I ride one station in Brisbane it's $1.5 with student ID, and the train to the airport is $20. Guess I have to leave Australia if I want to live cheaper.

I spent this last summer interning in the Bay Area.

At first I thought Muni was great, but after a few weeks I only took it for particularly out-of-the-way journeys (eg: Golden Gate Park to SOMA). It's a decent enough service, but it's just not very quick - even more so than this writer suggests.

The author cherry picks scenarios to support his viewpoint. I'm sure that San Franscico residents are aware that a 2 mile bus trip makes no sense for an able-bodied person, but those are two very specific criteria. Where is his evidence that 2 miles is the distance that the majority of people need to go? What happens when you do need to go more than two miles?

This is a pretty terrible article in many many ways. One of the few things I can agree with though is the Italy analogy. Someone needs to pull a Mussolini - sack everyone and start again.

Speaking of old, I wonder what would serve the very elderly or people with mobility difficulties in the absence of muni.

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