The key thing to always remember about all of this is this: Emilio
Cruz's job is to issue press releases to make Willie Brown look good.
His job fundamentally has nothing to do with running trains, or
getting people to their destinations. If Muni PR says that Muni is
"fixed", or if Muni PR issues press releases saying that there are "no
delays", and if anybody believes these lies, then his job is done.
(See the great letter Examimer Letter to the Editor 27 Oct 1998
from Dave Abston:
The Examiner printed Muni's claim that there were "no
delays" on the Metro during the Tuesday a.m. commute
(Muni watch, Oct. 20). If that's so, why did it take me one
hour and 45 minutes to travel from 40th and Judah to
Montgomery Station? Why did I spend 17 minutes sitting in a
packed, single N-Judah car at Duboce and Church behind
three other similarly stalled cars before our driver finally
urged us to "seek alternate transportation" ?
If there were "no delays" why were there nearly 60 people
waiting at the corner of Market and Church for an F car, many
escapees from L's and M's that had taken 45 minutes to get
to Church Street from West Portal?
Dave Abston, San Francisco.
)
Breakdowns should decrease as the Boeings are retired and the Bredas
arrive, assuming a good maintenance program is followed.
I don't understand why people keep parroting this party line.
Muni itself -- through Emilio "PR" Cruz himself -- admits that the
reliability of The World's Most Expensive Streetcars is _worse than_
that of the constantly-maligned Boeings. What we'll have is a newer
and heavier and noisier fleet with a more with-it 1990s paint livery,
not necessarily a more reliable fleet.
Of course, the bunching of car destinations is still a problem.
Perhaps the Metro Study Group commissioned by Mayor Brown will
present a solution.
Only if they can find enough rocket scientists to address this
profoundly difficult issue. Perhaps elected supervisor Amos "Muni
Ghandi" Brown will be able to provide a few suggestions that people
who actually use and ride Muni for years -- like, say, Rescue Muni's
Metro committee -- couldn't provide.
Notes: At the 35-40 train/hr rate, it seems like the trains travel slower.
The trains/hr rate and travel speed are beginning to get constrained by
passenger boarding time. It also takes 2 minutes or more for a train to
exit West Portal, because the driver has to talk to the supervisor and let
pedestrians and autos cross. This frequently causes a backup of trains
waiting to exit the tunnel.
Muni metro capacity was never constrained by train capacity. Period.
Only insane operations practice -- like running mostly single-car
trains, say -- could produce a situation in which train capacity was a
problem and in which a $70+ million dollar signalling system was needed
to address it, or in which a $70+ million dollar signalling system was
defeated by it.
Single-car operation, as you and others have noted, in fact _degrades_
throughput by increasing the total dwell time of the services. (Earth
to Muni: there's a reason that trains in the rest of the world are
long skinny things with lots of doors along the sides of them which
stop at long skinny platforms.) _If_ ATCS operation allowed multiple
trains to simultaneously load/unload at a single single platform, and
_if_ boarding passengers were able to efficiently move themselves to the
stopping location of their desired train, then dwell times _might_ not
degrade. But it doesn't, and they can't, so it does.
What an unmitigated fiasco.