This Morning’s J/N Joint Freakout…UPDATED

There’s nothing like turning on KGO news in the morning and watching the transportation report include a pretty wild N/J fail at 730 in the morning. It seems that due to a switching failure, J’s and N’s had to go to Church Station, where people de-boarded and switched over to outbound trains, and vice versa. (Well, actually there were lots of crowds, and not a lot of trains, as the Appeal reports.)
The good people on Twitter also reported their observations, and I’m sure MuniFail.com got a workout today (and the intern monitoring Gavin’s Twitter account is in a padded room now after having to read all those tweets. We’re sorry about that, kid.)
But in a weird way, it drove home why we are hoping (but not hopeful) that the Metropolitan Transportation Commission will vote to take the $70 million in federal dollars that are allocated to the debacle known as the Oakland Airport Connector, and re-allocate it to Bay Area transit agencies for maintenance costs. In other words, we have a chance to get some government cash to cover fixing problems like this so they don’t continue to bite us in our collective ass.
BART is likely to lose this money anyway, because they have a little over a month to comply with federal regulations they chose to flout, so this is our one and only chance to Not Screw Up Federal Funding.
Naturally, we’ve heard nothing from the Mayor, the SF MTC Board Rep. (Supervisor Mr. Chris Daly, who, if he busted out some mad organizing skillz and made this change happen would be forgiven all alleged sins and be true Hero of the Muni Owner/Rider and I’d ensure he never pays for a drink again in this town), and the MTC “staff” are rooting for failure aka the OAC project, despite the fact that it will likely never happen, and we’ll see that $70 million spent in some other state.
If you’re so inclined, send a note to the MTC board anyway, so if they do end up doing something stupid, at least we’ll have it on the record just how badly they f*cked this one up.
UPDATE: @larrybob on Twitter RT’d this link to some more pictures of this morning’s madness, courtesy of Twitter user @boyshapedbox. Ouch.
And, predictably, the MTC voted to continue forth with the $70 million boondoggle known as the Oakland Airport Connector. Sup. Daly voted no (thanks, but wish we’d stopped it) and he said that many of the people who voted yes for this piece of junk knew it’s a waste of federal dollars, but voted yes anyway. I’d like to think the Obama Administration would stick up for its principles and deny this thing when BART fraks up the process, but, well, you know….