The Axes Fall Soon….Final Transit Effectiveness Project Vote Coming Sept. 16!

The Transit Effecitiveness Project, the alleged saviour of Our MUNI, is about to bring down the hammer on the proposed changes to MUNI with a Big Meeting with Public Comment where the MTA board will politely listen to folks and their input, and promptly ignore them and pass the plan anyway.
To be fair, folks did some opportunities to be heard during the proceess. I hate to sound cynical, but for all the good things this plan tries to do, it seems like they’re almost ensuring that some parts of the city will be less accessible by transit in the name of “efficiency.”
Now, I’m not one of those folks who goes all NIMBY at the thought of change – for example, I like the idea of using smaller van buses on lines like the 39 Teresita, which serve a part of town that needs service, but not a big ol’ bus chugging away half empty. And likewise, there are many big promises for commuters to make the main arterial lines run faster.
Like most things done by The City, though, they’ve made a big assumption that most people use MUNI to commute to a job downtown (or to Caltrain). There doesn’t seem to be an accounting for people who need to use transit during the day to go to school, go to the store, assist with an elderly relative, and so on. All of this is cloaked in the language of “sacrifice” – usually made by people on the public dime who won’t ever know a day of job insecurity.
A quick persual of The Internets finds many sites where folks are concerned for the 6 Parnassus, the 39 Coit, assorted crtiques of line changes in North Beach, and so on. I’m sure there are others I missed – if you know of one, post it in the comments.
I’d be a bit less worried if I had faith that the great majority of promises being made would happen, thus making the transit cuts more bearable. Given the betrayal of promises made for Measure A last year, however, and the consistent failure of MUNI to avoid accidents of late, I’ll believe it when I see it.
For all articles on the Transit Effectiveness Project, check out these entries in the archives!
UPDATE” I apologize to everyone who’s been trying to post comments that don’t show up. I’m not deleting them – apparently this “spam blocker” I got is too efficient. That and comments seem to be frakked no matter what I do. If I make it open no matter what, the spammers win. If I try and make it cleaner, real comments never make it and I never even hear about them, thus ticking off Loyal Readers.
At this point I’m so pissed off about how Movable Type treats bloggers and these kinds of issues (esp. when we paid for the software and aren’t TypePad hippies) I may suck it up and switch to WordPress with all its faults. The fact that I’ve spent so much time reading worthless “manuals” to try and upgrade this site which was due months ago is just another slice in the “blogging sucks” sandwich.