@ktvu bus crash on fremont st. Not sure if there are injuries. pic.twitter.com/QcYm6zfVz3

— Art Perrin (@Gimpsly) September 27, 2017

An AC Transit bus traveling on Fremont Street around 9:20 a.m. Wednesday crashed into several vehicles including another AC Transit bus, and the collision temporarily shut down the Fremont off-ramp from the Bay Bridge.

As ABC 7 reports, at least four people had to be taken to the hospital as a result of the crash, including the driver of the bus that caused it, and they note that a medical emergency may or may not have been occurring with the driver.

The bus ended up coming to a stop on a sidewalk, as you can see in photos. As NBC Bay Area reports, the crash also damaged a construction site at Fremont and Folsom Streets. Reportedly no one was injured on the second bus.

The tweet below from an NBC Bay Area reporter says that five people were injured including the driver, two bus passengers, and two people in another car that was hit. Another tweet confirms that the Fremont ramp reopened as of about 11:20 a.m.

The cause of the crash has yet to be determined.

by Rebecca Cohen

For two weeks in April 2016, you could board a bus in San Francisco, climb into a personal sleeping pod with fresh linens and free wi-fi, and wake up the next morning in Los Angeles, all for just $50. If you slept on getting tickets for SleepBus, as the startup transportation service was called, you were out of luck — reservations filled up immediately, as did the company's voicemail box. So SleepBus went on hiatus for a year, and now it's back, with a new name and a steeper price.

Rebranded as Cabin, the bus line will resume service between Rincon Park and Santa Monica Pier beginning July 14, with one-way tickets starting at $115. That's about the same cost as a plane trip from SFO to LAX, or more in some cases, though the bus pods provide a level of comfort one would associate with an old-timey train experience. SF Weekly, which toured the new Cabin vehicles, says that they have "a neo-kitschy, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey flair," with staff wearing Pan Am-style uniforms.

The Weekly also sheds some light on why SleepBus shut down last year: Cofounder Gaetano Crupi told the paper that rides sold out in 36 hours, and the service's waitlist reached 20,000 people. "People were getting upset that they couldn’t get tickets, and we didn’t want to burn those relationships,” he said.

While a handful of one-star Yelp reviews from last spring allude to the company's struggles to deal with customer demand, Cabin was able to preserve its reputation enough to secure $3.3 million in seed financing, as it recently announced in a press release. Tom Currier, the company's other cofounder, tells Mashable he's trying to promote the service as a "moving hotel," since "buses have such a negative brand perception."

That might be a wise move, considering the fate of past attempts to launch a luxury bus service in San Francisco. Leap Transit, the private bus company that served coconut water onboard and mimicked Muni’s 30X Marina Express line, went bankrupt in 2015, two years after its debut — though competitor Chariot is still going strong and adding routes after getting acquired by Ford.

Still, here's hoping Currier can make his vision of a ride that "would basically be like you teleported to L.A." a smooth-running reality. Because no one really likes getting in and out of LAX, amirite?

Previously: Take An Overnight SF-to-LA Trip Aboard This Sleeper Pod Bus For Under $50

Shuttle Bus operator Bauer's Intelligent Transportation, whose black, monolithic motor coaches carry employees from clients like Cisco, Zynga, and Electronic Arts, plans to add 30 vehicles to its already sizable fleet, expanding service despite questions over its ability to use Muni bus stops going forward.

The new Bauer buses will consist of 2016 and 2017 models supplied by a Montreal-based vendor, Bauer's tells the Business Times, an addition that enlarges their army of more than 200 existing buses at an undisclosed cost estimated to be in the multi-millions.

In a statement on the expansion, CEO Gary Bauer cited the "growth potential we see in employer-provided commuter transit programs and large event transportation." Yet Bauer's move comes at a difficult time for the company's working relationship with San Francisco. The MTA opted to revoke the company's permit to use Muni stops, based in part on a history of violations Bauer's buses have purportedly made. 48 complaints were lodged against the company's vehicles between August 2015 and January 15, a preponderance of the complaints made to the MTA against such shuttles in general.

“Bauer’s continued violations of these requirements has contributed to unacceptable traffic congestion” as well as “impeded safe and efficient Muni operations by blocking access to Muni stops,” SFMTA officials reportedly informed the company. Bauer's permit was also revoked in part due to its purported anti-union tactics: Some employees in January claimed that their failed effort to unionize stemmed from the company's active discouragement and bullying tactics. By contrast, employees of bus contractor Loop Transportation, which serves Facebook and others, successfully unionized in 2015.

Bauer's has appealed the MTA's decision to pull its permits, and spokesperson Lauren Jennings tells the Business Times that "“Bauer’s is permitted to use the stops while the appeal process is pending." A hearing on the matter originally slated for last week has been rescheduled to September 23. Until then, says Jennings "There have been no interruptions to Bauer’s commuter services."

There are further wrinkles in any plans for San Francisco commuter shuttles: Those include proposed changes to the current Muni stop system, in favor of a hub system that's been floated, and an uptick in tech employees opting to commute from San Francisco to the South Bay by car.

Related: Tech Shuttle Drivers' Unionization Bid Fails Amid Claims Of Corporate Bullying

According to automatic passenger counters, between fiscal years 2014 and 2015 ridership declined on Muni motor coaches by by 3.4 percent and on trolley coaches by 7.3 percent. Wait, what? Muni has only felt more and more crowded, right?

The data doesn't add up because those numbers, invoked in an audit of the SFMTA performed by regional transit planners at the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, are incorrect.

The flawed stats stem from flawed automatic counters, which haven't been working properly since at least 2014, or so SFMTA spokesperson Paul Rose tells SFBay. Even then, only 40 percent of Muni buses possess counters, which are placed randomly throughout the system, and 250 of those across Muni are particularly unreliable aging, "legacy" counters. Indeed, manual checks on 250 Muni trips indicated that the counters were underestimating ridership by nine percent. One hypothesis: The horizontal sensors just don't work well during crowded conditions.

“We should have been much more vigilant about catching [the errors] and taking corrective actions,” said director of transit John Haley. Historical undercounting of ridership has persisted thanks to other Muni policies, such as discounting special events like Pride and Bay to Breakers in ridership counts. Further, the T-Third line hasn't ever been counted, because train ridership counts are done manually, and only ever eight years. Numbers for the T-Third line, which opened in 2007, are therefore not yet available.

According to the MTC, the "SFMTA reports it is working to ensure that ridership data is accurate, and that both legacy and future (automatic passenger counters) systems are properly operating... It is also starting to regularly track other indicators of ridership." One big change will be built-in: Better sensors on new Muni vehicles. “The new vehicles will not only provide more reliable service, but they include accurate, state of the art APCs that will count riders more reliably," Rose told SFBay.

Meanwhile, the number of people who actually pays their fare to ride Muni remains a highly unreliable indicator of how many people really take Muni.

Related: Ask A San Francisco Native: Has Muni Behavior Gotten Better, Or Worse?

For more than two years, some seats on Muni buses have been perpetually in the up position, locked and unusable. The move was made to limit liability after the company that builds Muni buses warned its customers that there had been a few injuries because those seats don't have any kind of barrier in front of them. These are the culprits we're talking about:

"Unfortunately, we have not been able to find another solution, and these seats will be permanently flipped up," an SFMTA spokesperson said at the time. That's been the situation since June 2014 — but yesterday the transit agency revealed a groundbreaking solution: Kinked poles that can also swivel. What a time to be alive.

These aren’t just any metal poles — technically, they’re known as “rotational stanchions” because they rotate to allow space for customers with wheelchairs and strollers. When the seats are flipped up, a yellow knob at the bottom of the pole can be pulled to unlock the pole and rotate it out of the way.

Yep, these poles provide something to hold onto, but they can also get out of the way for ADA compliance. This is a retrofit operation, and new Muni buses that are on the way won't be subject to the same problem. Of the 570 current buses getting the retrofit treatment, 350 are finished, with the rest to be done by the fall. As someone who truly does love sitting down — it's sort of my personal vice — I can hardly contain myself.

Previously: Muni Locks Down Potentially Dangerous Front-Facing Bus Seats

“I don’t want to talk too much about it," billionaire CEO Elon Musk said secretively at a transportation conference in Norway yesterday according to Bloomberg. "I have to be careful what I say.”

The vaguest whisper from Musk — whose ideas for better batteries, electric cars, and space travel, seem at once far-fetched and within reach — has been known to send tech journalists and futurist prophets into a trance. So it comes as little surprise that when the Tesla CEO delivered his Delphic idea for an autonomous mass-transit option, his audience was all ears and imagination.

“We have an idea for something which is not exactly a bus but would solve the density problem for inner city situations,” Musk said, adding that “Autonomous vehicles are key."

As the Verge chimes in, Musk is a longtime enemy of traffic. To Bloomberg TV, he said "Gridlock is just a soul-destroying thing.” It's with such problems in mind that Musk has floated such ideas as his Hyperloop.

Some have speculated that Tesla's newest offering, the Model 3, could be a proving ground for the company's autonomous driving technology. “I very much agree with solving the high-density urban transport problem,” Musk also said, gesturing vaguely to "a new type of car or vehicle that would be great for that and that’ll actually take people to their final destination and not just the bus stop.” That last statement might hint at dynamic routing — or maybe not!

SFist reached out to Muni drivers to ask them what they thought of Musk's idea, but their response was brief. “Information gladly given," they said, "but safety requires avoiding unnecessary conversation."

Related:
Radio Flyer Makes Tiny Teslas For CEOs-In-Training

Yesterday evening the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency adopted a new budget that, if approved by the Board of Supervisors, will penalize commuters who purchase tickets the old fashioned way with good ol' American Washingtons and Roosevelts. The budget, which the Chronicle reports is over $2 billion for the 2017 and 2018 fiscal years, stipulates that people who pay their Muni fares in cash (as opposed to with a Clipper card, or, shudder, the Muni phone app) would be hit with a 25-cent penalty.

At the same time, the budget also proposes reducing towing fees for all the car owners among us. And while yes, at some of the highest in the country, the fees associated with getting a car towed in SF should be lowered, that they are being done so in the same budget that makes riding the bus more expensive essentially stands as a "fuck you" to anyone putting their faith in San Francisco's transit-first policy.

It's also worth considering just who exactly pays with cash, as opposed to the aforementioned Muni phone app.

“We have people who don’t have Clipper cards for a number of reasons,” Jessica Lehman, executive director of Senior and Disability Action, told the Chron. “They don’t trust it; they’re afraid of losing it. People in those situations shouldn’t have to pay for it.”

But under the newly proposed budget people in those situations would very much be paying for it — to the tune of $2.50 per bus ticket.

In addition to Lehman's seniors, what about people who have limited internet access and are really broke? Unless you sign up online and enroll in autoload at the same time, adult Clipper cards cost $3. And if you depend on Muni to get to and from work every day, that extra 50 cents a day adds up fast — especially if you're cash-strapped in the first place.

"Public transit, including taxis and vanpools, is an economically and environmentally sound alternative to transportation by individual automobiles," reads San Francisco's transit-first policy. "Within San Francisco, travel by public transit, by bicycle and on foot must be an attractive alternative to travel by private automobile."

As the Board of Supervisors considers whether or not to pass the SFMTA proposed budget as is, it would serve us all if they took a moment to remind themselves of what forms of transit they're supposed to be promoting. However, as that is unlikely to happen, you should probably just download the Muni app — the loads of 1-star reviews probably means that it works just fine.

Previously: Day Around The Bay: Your Muni Ticket Could Be Getting More Expensive

On a beautiful Earth Day last year, SFMTA officials excitedly unveiled the first of sixty brand new electric trolley buses purchased by the city of San Francisco. In conjunction with 61 new biodiesel-electric hybrid buses, these $1.1 million-a-piece vehicles were touted as a crucial investment in a public transit system still running buses 20-plus-years old. There's just one problem: The 60-foot buses can't go up San Francisco's hills.

In fact, the buses were never designed to handle our iconic hills — anything over a 10 percent grade wears down motor components. So reports the Examiner, which notes that the New Flyer buses also struggle to meet Muni's internal acceleration standards on inclines of 5 to 10 percent — sometimes taking double the time during tests to accelerate to required speeds on the slight inclines.

"This is troubling," one Muni operator who wished to remain anonymous told the paper, "especially because San Francisco’s fleet is called upon to climb the steepest terrain of any trolley-coach system in the world on a daily basis.”

Muni's solution? Run the new buses on flat routes. And besides, it's not like the old Electric Transit Inc. buses were doing just fine — SFMTA’s director of transit John Haley told the Examiner that they were “a maintenance nightmare.”

So enjoy your fleet of futuristic new buses. Unless you live or work on a hill, that is.

Related: Two Of Muni's Electric Buses Caught Fire Last Week

Private shuttle service Chariot is a transportation alternative for everyone (they promise!), and they're launching new routes this week (well, maybe) to prove it. In what is perhaps best read as a business move to diversify their clientele before the inevitable bubble burst, the company says that in addition to their founding routes targeting Marina dwellers commuting to FiDi and SoMa, the company is trying out picking up passengers in the morning at BART and Caltrain stations and transporting them to parts of the city that are underserved by public options.

The new routes, which Hoodline reports will run in reverse of their currently listed routes, will ideally expand on the success of the company's Fisherman Flyer route that launched earlier this year — that route picks up workers in the tourism industry at Embarcadero BART and shuttles them all the way to Beach and Leavenworth Streets.

However, none of these new routes are on the Chariot website routes page, which calls into question how serious the company is about rolling them out now, as Hoodline stated.

SFist reached out to Chariot about the discrepancy, and company Founder & CEO Ali Vahabzadeh replied via email that the company is "still working on the reverse commute on one of our routes as a test." This of course suggests that the single reverse route in test phase may never get added permanently, and the others may never see the light of day (even as a test) at all.

The company has thus far managed to avoid much of the controversy that accompanied their more upscale competitor Leap, who was both called a "crock of shit" and accused of creating “a two-tiered transportation system in San Francisco” by Supervisor John Avalos.

Leap is no more, and sold (at least) one of its super-fancy buses on eBay for $17,999.

If Chariot does eventually launch additional routes meant to serve people commuting into SF and traveling to all its far corners, it will be harder for those opposed to the service to paint it as merely a way for the rich to avoid rubbing elbows with the city's Muni-riding populace.

However, as the company has yet to actually do so, it looks like we'll just have to wait and see.

Previously: New Private Bus Service Called Chariot Is Charioting Marina Folk Downtown

Another terrible new development in our transit landscape has arrived: Chariot, a private bus service that is currently serving two routes in the morning and evening, both of them catering to Marina dwellers. Not content to ride the Dirty 30 or the 30X Marina Express, people can pay around $4 a ride (or $93 for a monthly pass) to get shuttled in greater comfort, Google bus-style, directly from Chestnut Street either to the Financial District or SoMa.

As TechCrunch reports, "the company is doing about 2,000 rides per week and has provided roughly 35,000 paid rides to date." And they're getting set to launch a third route, also from the Marina, to western SoMa — they're doing this on a crowdfunding model, waiting for 120 riders to sign up and buy monthly passes before they launch it.

While this all may seem ugly and capitalist in an era when Muni needs all the help and financial support it can get, it should be noted that many of Muni's routes were, at one time (pre-1912), run by private entrepreneurs and were only later absorbed under a single system. The Bold Italic adds that there were private jitney lines throughout town as late as the 1970s. And given Muni's slowness, and the difficulty of getting from the Marina to pretty much anywhere, a shuttle service like this was inevitable. Note the following sales graphic, appealing to Marina girls who don't want to wear out their expensive heels.

Chariot now has a mobile app that shows the location of shuttles in real time and lets customers check in for their rides.

And CEO Ali Vahabzadeh says he doesn't think they're competing with Muni so much as they're providing an overflow option. "A lot of our customers are actually [watching as] three or four buses [pass] which are overcrowded," he says. "I think we’re actually bringing more commuters back into the transit-first fold as opposed to having them drive to work and congest the streets even more, or commute through Uber, Lyft or Sidecar."

And that would be the private-transit-first fold, just to be clear.

Two volunteer cartographers, we're told, have been working for ten years to improve upon Muni's current, highly confusing bus and Metro route map, which is a convoluted tangle of rainbow squiggles, inexplicable boxes, and dotted lines.

The new map, which Streetsblog tells us will be rolling out over the next nine months and installed in most bus shelters by March 2015, makes a priority of highlighting the fastest service routes, like the Metro, with the use of bolder lines. And, hopefully, it will make more sense.

I say hopefully, because all we have to go on right now is the detail below, courtesy of cartographers David Wiggins and Jay Primus, who I repeat, worked without pay. The map has not yet been finalized and still has some more bureaucracy to get through, but you can read more details about it in this SFMTA document.

Compare that to this atrocious mess, which we've been living with for, well, more than a decade now.

And now compare that to the quaint days of 1947, when Muni operators all looked like this, and when the trolley and cable car lines were a lot less complicated. And there was no Express or Limited or Owl service.

We look forward to seeing the new one, in its complete form, and deciding whether to cheer or complain.

[Streetsblog]
[SFMTA - pdf]

Seen here totally shredding, a brave skater boy skitching on a corporate shuttle in San Francisco. And for those of you who don't know who or what a Marty McFly is: ugh, here you go.

If you moved in front of, say, Lombard Street or the Powerhouse, you'd except some sort of tourist-related melee, yes? Well, don't tell that to the neighbors in Alamo Square who have had it up to here with tour buses infiltrating the tony neighborhood.

Right now, San Francisco has banned said buses from hauling lazy tourists to see the famed Victorian homes on Steiner Street. But some of those buses, it seems, are still sneaking their way into the neighborhood. Bastards. And now residents, fed up with the verboten vehicles, are going so far as to egg and kick the buses. The Chronicle has more:

"There's still drivers coming through the neighborhood, and they're still as aggressive as ever," said Kelly Edwards, who lives in the big Westerfeld House at the corner of Fulton and Scott streets. "They still think it's a thoroughfare. It makes me mad as hell."

Edwards fought for the ban and even posted a sign in his home's window reading, "Get off your big, fat tour bus and experience San Francisco." He said the number of buses shuttling through has since dropped but that certain drivers ignore the law.

"I've gotten into the street to try to get them the other way, and they make kissing faces at me," Edwards said.

His girlfriend, Heidi Knodle, will sometimes join him in obstructing the buses.

"We try to block them, but they knock us out of the way," she said. "I egged one bus. We're marking them. I was kicking a bus the other day, and neighbors were cheering along."

Pst, vomit works better, Kelly!

But the issue here, at least ostensibly, is pedestrian safety and traffic congestion. "The residential streets in San Francisco are too small to accommodate large tour buses," Gus Hernandez, an irate Alamo Square resident, explains.

Hopefully, this can get resolved before tourist season hits. Alamo Square has enough problems with bus congestion, shuttling tech sect members to and from the Peninsula.

Mayor Ed Lee and the SFMTA have reached an agreement with a coalition of tech companies whose behemoth employee shuttles have sparked protests for their use of public bus stops. Today, Lee announced that the bus operators serving companies such as Genentech, Google, Apple, LinkedIn and Facebook will be charged a fee based on the number of stops they make in Muni bus zones. The money, which is projected to bring in about $1.5 million over an 18 month pilot program, will be directed towards maintenance of public transit infrastructure.

The news comes as so-called "Google buses" have sparked angry muttering and some outraged protests, including this ill-conceived and memorable poseur. They're an apt analogy for a generalized air of unease surrounding housing shortages, skyrocketing rents and gentrification that have come to characterize the Bay's new tech boom, even as tech companies claim that they keep hundreds of additional cars off city streets each day.

The agreement won't do too much to appease people who were using the tech buses as an easy metaphor for a larger problem, but the added transit revenue could serve to soothe a few ruffled feathers. Or not.

Previously: Angry Protesters Block, Smash Google Bus, 'This Is A City For The Right Kind Of People,' Screams (FAKE) Google Employee To Protester

[SFGate]
[@JoeVazquez]