The Bonding Power of MUNI

Talk to anyone from San Francisco long enough and two things are guaranteed to come up in the conversation: the price of housing and MUNI. These two topics alone can get most people through a long lunch with a total stranger.

For those of you who are not from the Bay Area, MUNI is the public transport system in San Francisco. When I started my job I was introduced to the joys of this system. I have to admit, that for the first few months, it really wasn't that bad in terms of timing. The trains were usually on time and they generally didn't break down.

Recently, though, they changed the lines around. In theory, twice as many trains should be running and since the trains are running twice as often, they halved the size of the train. This sounds logical, except that people come in waves, not spread out evenly. So we all get packed in like sardines (or as one person, whose grasp of English was a bit tenuous, put it, like sausages).

I'm convinced that someone with a nasty sense of humor came up with the new system. There are two possible platforms to board the trains from; to get from one platform to another requires crossing lanes of busy, fast traffic. There is no reliable way to tell which train is coming next, so hordes of people stampede across the lanes to the train that they just spotted pulling in.

Since this is obviously extremely dangerous, they have crossing guards now, whose jobs are a little trying. One was desperately trying to get us all to stand on the pavement instead of spilling out into the street. People wanted to be in a good spot for a run to catch the Caltrain, though, so they weren't co-operating. Eventually, the crossing guard gave up and said words to the effect of: 'Fine, get hit.'

Before the re-arrangement to the schedules, strangers didn't talk to each other much on the trains. Now they do; whole conversations revolve around "What's wrong with the MUNI system" and my personal favorite "Are we going to make our connection?" One guy even successfully managed to get a petition together and showed up on the local news.

A friend of mine recently pointed out that there's nothing like a shared complaint to bring people together. If that's true, incompetence at MUNI may be a major force holding the social network of San Francisco together.