As well they should win. If the city bothered to provide proper services, then these alternatives would not be profitable.
But godforbid someone might challenge their monopoly. San Francisco, learn how to compete, don't be chicken and outlaw the competition, despite relying on my and every other citizens taxes... Shame muni.
I've heard this opinion repeated often on HN, but personally I never had any problems getting around SF using the Muni bus system when I was there. It isn't even very expensive compared to fare prices here in Europe. What's the problem with it?
It's interesting that Chariot can sell a bus ride for barely more than the (heavily subsidised) MUNI costs.
In my limited experience though, it seems that when I ride the MUNI I'm the only person actually paying a fare. Everybody else either has some kind of pass or is fare evading.
It does not help that some of their maintenance staff is on 200K/y salary. Last time I have checked their wages it was pretty obvious that some of the staff is overpaid greatly. I also know some anecdotal stories about how employees exploiting the company.
It's neither realistic nor desirable that maintenance workers in San Francisco should live in San Francisco. Any more than the cleaners at the Hilton should live in the Hilton.
San Francisco is a small expensive area within a large metropolis, it's not that tricky to commute from somewhere a lot cheaper.
You don't think what's an inapt analogy? Wait, your Ferrari analogy that you made in the same post?
And it is indeed a great analogy because it shows how wrong you are -- having advanced cars that can rapidly accelerate to freeway speeds be affordable is a very desirable thing, and the fact that a Honda Civic of today is a vastly superior automobile to a Ferrari of the past (or better yet, a Volvo of the past) is a triumph of modernity. You think what, cars are too good?
Likewise, the fact that many people of today find that the best way to live involves throwing years of their lives away on a long commute is a human tragedy, and thinking that it's not desirable for this to be fixed is equally brain-damaged as thinking people shouldn't have good cars.
Rights are an arbitrary idea. Simply emphasizing that something is or isn't a right is tantamount to writing a fictional book. Even something as literally life altering as whether your own government (assuming you live in a democracy) can rightfully kill you or not is arbitrarily decided [0].
Look. I work in the SOMA neighborhood of SF. That doesn't give me the right to live there (and I don't - it's too expensive, so I live in the south bay).
And as we saw with the recent refugee crisis no one is entitles to live at all. But if we strive to build a good society for whatever reason, one of the optimum solutions is to mix people of different backgrounds and paths of life together to enhance the social mobility.
When it was started it also was not wheelchair accessible. Not sure if this is still the case. Cherry picking profitable routes is not the same as providing access to all residents of the city.
Reminds me of insurance companies cherry picking the healthy people. The profit motive conflicts with providing a universal service. While it can work, in Australia we have a public Health system, Medicare, that covers everybody.
The thing about common carriers is that they're designed to be the carriers of last resort. They have special dispensation from a governing body to operate and -in return- they are obliged to offer their services to all who can afford them.
Common carriers are a long-standing practice that has clear benefits for society as a whole. What's more, back in the 1960s and 1970s we -as a nation- realized that there is value in helping the weak, infirm, disadvantaged, and those subject to discrimination participate as fully as they are able to in the public sphere.
If you want a somewhat less academic reason, remember that you can be afflicted by illness, infirmity, handicap, or -albeit on a longer timescale- discrimination at any time. When you're down, it's good to have services available that help prevent you from hitting rock bottom and allow you to help yourself get back on your feet quicker than you would on your own.
> ...when I ride the MUNI I'm the only person actually paying a fare...
By this, do you mean "I'm the only one who seems to be paying in cash?". If you do, then the vast majority of folks who aren't fare-jumping are either:
* Using a Clipper Card [0] that has a "cash" balance
* Using a Clipper Card that has a monthly pass on it
* Using a Clipper Card that has a transfer from another bus on it
* Using a paper transfer from a previous actual-cash transaction with the farebox
[0] RFID tag which locally stores a balance, a couple of ticket types, and a shocking amount of your fare history. I presume that the data from the card readers on the buses are synced up with some central DB periodically.
Anecdotally, at least, I see a lot of people riding Muni who are fare evading. I've also never seen any fare enforcement on a Muni bus, despite living here for ~6 years.
You must have never done anything like -say- use the 38 to connect to CalTrain shortly before or shortly after rush hour. :)
I made the 38->30/45->CalTrain or 47->CalTrain ride every single day for nearly a year. It seemed like once a month or once every other month, MTA fare inspectors would board the 38, 47, or -far more rarely- 30/45 I was riding and check everyone's proof of payment. On the 38 and the 47, it always took about five minutes and was a... fairly irritating delay on top of a really irritating commute.
I have a monthly pass and can't always be bothered to swipe my ClipperCard. It would look to you like I'm fare evading, but I'm not really. Perhaps others are doing the same.
The Fare Inspectors will fine you if you haven't bothered to swipe your card, even if you have a monthly pass. The card stores a record of the last $WAY_TOO_MANY interactions with a Clipper Card reader, so it's trivial for them to check. Those guys have no sense of humor. :(
I'm a huge fan of Caltrain's policy: Monthly pass holders only have to interact with a reader twice at the beginning of the month [0]; once when you board and once when you disembark. For the rest of the month the conductors use their brains to remember the current month, and compare that against the end date on your monthly pass.
[0] And -realistically- you don't even have to do that. I went a couple of months without interacting with the Caltrain readers; the conductors never said a thing.
Not sure how it works on the muni, but I had a similar thought when I saw lots of people getting on my town's BRT without paying a fare. Then I got a six-month pass (from my employer), and now it looks like I'm not paying a fare, either, since it only had to be validated once.
Yup - you can download 60 days of ride history from clippercard.com if you register your card. Tracks every tag (so entry only on Muni/AC Transit/VTA, entry/exit on BART and Caltrain).
Folks might want to see Nancy Pelosi's daughter's documentary San Francisco 2.0 on the impact of inequality on the city, which happened to be plugged on the most recent Real Time.
Or the dolmus in Turkey. Or the equivalent service in many countries.
It always irritated me that American countries don't use the more practical neighborhood-to-neighborhood model to provide more convenient service outside the main lines.
This could also be used to transport people in a hub-and-spoke model throughout the valley, like they do in Istanbul. A combination of Caltrain, BART, and quick-moving busses and vans could more efficiently move people.
The van drivers just couldn't make as much as a bus driver, or the subsidy would have to be bigger. (12 people * 2 dollars = 24 dollars for an hour one-way in rush hour, which is hard to make profitable.)
I can not agree more. The whole concept of services like these revolves around "private vans ride along the most dense and profitable streets to achieve 100% utilization of the vehicle".
Share taxis (jitneys, dollar vans, etc) is a world-wide phenomenon which is very common in the developing world, because the municipalities there can not afford to subsidize public transit which is rarely profitable[1].
The only thing that share taxis can do efficiently is to generate profits for the owners, while they are dramatically inefficient at:
- providing guaranteed time frame for the services which is convenient to many categories of passengers (e.g. from 07:00 to 23:30)
- providing coverage of all neighbourhoods of a city
- providing integrated payments (you can not transfer from one van to another for free when changing routes)
- synchronizing timetables between 2 different services, which is crucial to connections [2]
Essentially, those private transit services are the same old jitneys, but running only for commuters and having efficient ordering systems (smartphones). And private transit systems never evolve into efficient passenger transportation networks [3]
But godforbid someone might challenge their monopoly. San Francisco, learn how to compete, don't be chicken and outlaw the competition, despite relying on my and every other citizens taxes... Shame muni.