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Monday, March 14, 2011

What's Up with the Very Slow Muni Metro Rides in the Twin Peaks Tunnel?


How was your weekend? Mine good because I picked-up a couple of sandwiches at Ike's Place (I split a Menage a Trois & 'Hella' Fat Bastard sandwiches with a colleague), and went book shopping down at the liquidated Borders at the Westfield mall in downtown.

Whenever I want to head out to downtown, I park my car nearby St. Francis Circle and take Muni metro's K/T or M lines. But this weekend, the Muni metro was just flat out slow along the Twin Peaks tunnel between Forest Hill and Castro stations.

We all are used to the Twin Peaks tunnel stretch from those two stations and it's always been slow. I'd always feel the brakes kick in every several seconds and feel the train speed-up just briefly. One reason is that Nat Ford admitted during a SFMTA Board meeting the tracks are in poor condition, thereby the trains could not go full speed along the tracks. Back in my younger days about 15 years ago, the metro trains ran in manual, went full speed, and blazed down the Twin Peaks tunnel; but when the automatic system kicked-in and Muni started running the whale trains known as Bredas down the tracks at slower speeds, and it just continuously got slower and slower. But last weekend, it was super slow.

The worst segment is when the inbound metro trains are getting close to Castro station when the straight track starts to curve to the start of the Castro street platform. The trains are now running at a crawl speed vs. a much faster speed like before. It also runs extra slow going outbound from when it leaves Castro station to when it reaches the straight track segment. I've also noticed the trains running slower this weekend along the straight tracks to/from Forest Hill to/from the curve to the Castro station.

Gees Muni, so a big government agency says your trains and rails suck, so you run slower on that segment alone? The rest of the metro track segments on your automatic train system are running at its regular (fast) speeds. Fix the damn tracks or give me a good excuse of why I shouldn't just take BART more often.

1 comment:

Mark said...

Why didn't they replace the tracks in that segment when they did work on the power lines a couple years ago? I guess that would make too much sense.