Newsom continues ‘Less is More’ strategy
After last week’s announcement announcement by Mayor Gavin Newsom that reducing the number of trash cans will reduce litter comes this week’s exercise in counter-intuitive mayoral thinking: reducing the number of bus stops means better Muni service.
The mayor could be on to something here. What are some other ways in which, by actually cutting something, he could improve it?
KQED radio has to limit its pledge drives to three days only — but during those three days, they feature spellbinding tales by local authors who reveal the ending to cliffhanger stories only when enough people make pledges. An anthology of the stories becomes the main pledge drive giveaway, saving us from endless spiels about weather radios, tote bags, t-shirts and other useless crap.
Supervisor Chris Daly is limited to one outburst a month. The inevitable effect of this rule is that he quits politics and goes into talk radio.
The number of kayaks in McCovey Cove during ballgames is cut to two, and they have to stay behind starting lines at opposite ends of the cove. When a home run is hit into the water, they race each other head on to see who gets the ball.
Only one car at a time gets to go down the crooked part of Lombard Street — but he gets to go as fast as he wants.
Actually, Mark, if you want to blame anyone for the call to reduce bus stops, blame the MUNI drivers because that’s where the suggestion came from. Some lines have stops every block; would it really be so awful if they had stops every other block or every third block?
I’m not a fan of Mayor Hairball by any stretch of the imagination, but this proposal seems to make sense.
The number of bus stops in the city is ridiculous. I know a number of streets where there are TWO stops in one block (Clay street between Polk and Larkin is one example). Why?? And why don’t the LRVs have the right of way at all times? Get rid of the stop signs, turn all LRV surface street routes into traffic light right of ways. One stop for every 3 blocks (which means the farthest you’d have to walk to get to a stop is 1 1/2 blocks in one direction).
I read in the Examiner article that MUNI gets 12 miles every hour speed, while Boston, the fastest in the U.S. is somewhere around 6 miles every hour.
Those of you that went out for pride and took MUNI know how broken and ridiculously silly the transit system is here, and it was disgraceful to all the out of towners. It just can’t handle the amount of people that want to use it. And have a bus stop at every block, or sometimes, twice every block, is a large part of the slowness of it all. I’m all for having to walk 1 more block to get to my stop if it guarantees me better faster service!
I could not agree more with fixmunidotcom. That is why I have given up on riding the buses in this city. I will walk, take the subway, or cab it. Or, if my friends are nice, they will give me a ride.
This picture really tells the story. I don’t know how you resolve the Muni problem, but we elect our leaders hoping they will. Maybe its worth giving it a try as opposed to not doing anything at all?
A bus stop every 3 blocks is a great idea. When ever I have to ride the 21 Hayes home, it’s so frustrating. There are 3 or 4 blocks that have 2 STOPS on them! WTF???
Is the opinion of this blog that we should not reduce some MUNI stops? Do any of you every actually ride MUNI?
Many of these redundant stops date way way back to the days when there were more rail lines, and competing bus lines. When everything finally merged into one system, many of them stuck around.
This is one of those things, though where the idea “sounds” great, but the devil is in the details. If they cut some stops as part of a data-driven plan to improve the entire system, hooray. If they just cut stops to make the Mayor and MUNI “look” good, without really making the system actually work, then it’s just more rhetoric.