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Friday, December 4, 2009

On the "Last Ride" for the 18-46th Avenue


It's tough to say goodbye to the 18-46th Avenue's route that serves Geary, Point Lobos, the Cliff House, and a small portion of La Playa.

Today is the last day of service for this segment before it is re-routed to take over the 38-Geary Ocean Beach branch segment from 33rd/Geary to the Ocean Beach terminal. This will make it more challenging for me to catch this bus line that goes directly to my workplace at SF State as I have to walk the notorious steep hills between Balboa and Geary.

Today's "last ride" did not have my usual driver (actually, I haven't seen her in a week), and one of those orange vested SFMTA "ambassadors" was on the bus as well to remind people of the deleted segment starting tomorrow.

Even more interesting is the buses had their automated announcements fixed. The bus announced every single stop, but only the street names. The modified announcements did not mention any major attractions/locations like this one: "Lake Merced and Font; San Francisco State University" or mentioning the SF Zoo.

Even more amusing is listening to the announcements that mentioned that the bus line will be modified and service hours reduced in three different languages, but also noticing that it kept getting cut-off every time because the stop announcements had priority over these reminders.

Read my obit-lette for the 18-46th Avenue and 38-Geary Ocean Beach branch on Muni Diaries.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well, I can already see how well they did with the new routes. As of Sunday night, the last 10 at Sansome and Sacramento (Inbound) was supposed to be there at 8:27, but there was no sign of it between 8:10 and 8:45, nor was there any prediction for it on nextmuni. And the next 12 at that same location was supposed to be at 8:13, then at 8:36, then at 8:58, but when I left at 8:45 nextmuni.com was only listing one 12, which was going to be there in 63 minutes.

For those of you who are counting, assuming nextmuni is right (always a risky assumption), that is a total of at least 5 missing busses.

And for this I'm going to be paying $75? I don't think so. I have a car. $6 per work day for parking, or $3.50 per work day for muni that takes twice as long even when I'm staggeringly lucky and get a bus with a minimum of waiting?

Hmmmm.