Results tagged “subway”

On Saturday January 10, San Franciscans will be asked to drop their pants for the 8th Annual No Pants! Subway Ride. The flash mob-esque event will happen in a concentrated area, with the meeting point and starting time to be posted in early January. But in the meantime, feel free to RSVP fro the mildly nude subway ride on Facebook, right here.

Anyone who follows Muni knows to roll their eyes when the subject of ATCS comes up. That's the lousy old software that controls the trains in the subway -- it was supposed to speed things up when it was installed back in the 90s, but as we know, subway service is slow slow slow. It's also to blame for those incomprehensible maps displayed on the flat-screens on the platforms. And now, finally, it's close to getting a makeover.

Hey, you know those awful flatscreen maps in the subways? The ones with the confusing station names and the pixelated Alcatel diagrams that look like a screengrab from an Atari 2600? Don't get too accustomed to them, because Muni and NextBus are working on something better. It'll take a few weeks -- at least -- but eventually, they'll be replaced by nicer, prettier, more accurate, data. Hooray! That only took, what, a billion fucking years?

Good news! The FTA says that building a Central Subway would be a great idea. The FTA, whose local website hasn't been updated in about a year, evaluated project justification, mobilitiy improvements, and land use; and they gave the project a "medium-high" to "high" rating in those categories. They're also supposed to rate alternatives analysis and local financial commitment, but those criteria aren't mentioned in Muni's chipper press release.

Well, whaddya know. No sooner did we lavish praise upon the SF County Transportation Authority than Nat Ford, head of Muni, decided that he might be interested in committing a hostile takeover of the SFCTA... thereby making the TA as flawless as Muni. Good idea! If agency was melting down, and there was another one making us look bad, we might want to buy it and run it into the ground, too! (That's why we're always wishing we could seize control of SF Metblogs.)