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NextBus is an old system that uses 2G cellular links. It doesn't need much data, so that's fine. Now 2G service is being discontinued by AT&T in SF, and Muni has to switch. Or switch to T-Mobile, which is offering 2G service for another year.

This was an early "Internet of Things" project. I met the inventor once at the Hacker Conference. This is a general problem with "Internet of Things" products - you're dependent on infrastructure which might go away.

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There's no excuse for this happening -- AT&T announced the end of life of 2G four years ago in 2012. Now Muni claims that the shutdown took them by surprise and they are scrambling to replace all of the old 2G equipment

https://www.sfmta.com/about-sfmta/blog/why-muni-arrival-time...

Simply put, the deactivation work that affects our vehicles started sooner than expected and outpaced our ongoing upgrade of all Muni vehicles to a new communications and monitoring system.

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-08-03/at...

AT&T Friday [announced] that the shutdown of its second-generation, or "2G," wireless network will be complete by the end of 2016

At the time, I was managing some devices that used 2G to send telemetry -- our AT&T sales rep called us to warn us about the shutdown.

I leased an Infinity over a year ago... it has the same "problem": the connected features rely on an ATT 2G radio. They made me sign a form acknowledging it would stop working January 1, 2017.

There is zero chance Muni wasn't aware of this. I have no idea why they didn't ask for money to upgrade the system earlier... it seems like a tailor-made situation to get a budget increase: legitimately blame it on someone else and use the largesse to buy a brand new much better system that you normally can't get approved.

Sure there is.

> There's no excuse for this happening -- AT&T announced the end of life of 2G four years ago in 2012. Now Muni claims that the shutdown took them by surprise and they are scrambling to replace all of the old 2G equipment

Typically, what that means is, pulled out of the ciphered jargon, "Relevant technical information was not adequately conveyed to the appropriate management in such a fashion as to outlast political appointment churn, thus, the current execs had no idea".

It's a two sided problem: well meaning and ignorant top levels and wellmeaning and poor communicating lower management.

The other analysis is that the current leadership was hung out on a limb to dry by the people who did know it was a problem, and the current leadership couldn't surface the relevant information. :-)

Muni has been upgrading the radios in the shelter signs over the last year, so they're definitely aware of it and have been working on it.

They could use Hologram's SIM which uses T-Mobile's 2G and 3G network as well as AT&T in the US [1]

[1] https://hologram.io/cellular/

Given SF is more and more the center of the US, how is it that your public transport still falls victim to such neglect? I understand the lack of appreciation for most cities in the US (like mine) since we don't really prioritize, but SF should have its shit together given how dense of a city it has become.

Politics.

Given SF is more and more the center of the US

It isn't. And Muni has been awful forever, admirably steadfast in awfulness through multiple booms and busts.

Hahahaha, once you live here you realize the incompetence is pervasive. California and SF is a very mismanaged place.

Public transport sucks everywhere in America, and I have never heard SF described as the center of the US. What do you mean by that?

SF is not the center of the US. It's just a city in California.

There are two serious global cities in the US — NYC and SF. I don't think it is unreasonable to suggest that the center of power/influence/whatever in the US is shifting to these cities over middle America.

> There are two serious global cities in the US — NYC and SF

After New York each of Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Houston and D.C.'s metropolitan areas are more economically larger than San Francisco's [1]. SF is also relatively negligible as a global financial centre.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._metropolitan_ar...

MSAs aren't great definitions of geographical areas — San Jose is part of the Bay Area. If you include San Jose in SF, then SF is the clear #3 in total — and per capita would be a step function ahead of any other American city apart from NY.

Even beyond this, I don't think GDP is a good definition of "global city" — I don't think a city with massive commodity outflows could fit into the category, for instance.

If you include San Jose in SF, you're not really talking about SF. I've lived in SF on and off for many years and am very fond of the place. The notion it's a 'global city' in the same category as NYC or LA seems like quite a stretch.

Um.

Los Angeles. Chicago. Atlanta.

There are many global cities in the US - NYC, Chicago, D.C, Dallas, Houston and S.F would maybe be a distant 6th or 7th. You might want go do some traveling and broaden your perspective.

How can you say that the center of power and influence is shifting to New York and S.F? New York has been a center of power since the Dutch arrived.

Besides a bunch of tech startups what is S.F the center of?

San Francisco's Muni is not subject to neglect! It is meeting its objectives very well. It's just that its objectives don't actually include things like "actually moving people" and "cost control" (or even "revenue"). They are more like "advance the political career of whoever is in charge", at the highest levels, and "provide lifetime employment for everyone in the union with incredibly generous terms of work", for day to day operations. One of Muni's main problems with timeliness is drivers who don't show up, requiring either overtime work from other drivers (which they have trouble affording) or cancelling the bus.

And if you think that's great, then just wait while the CALPERS pension fund (all state employees) collapses over the next few decades and no one has any money for transit anymore. It's not just the usual overpromise and underdelivering with a taxpayer guarantee on the difference. It's not even just a problem with corruption, explicit bribery, and pay-to-play campaign donations, though it has been wreaked with all of those scandals. Even when it's otherwise ostensibly on the level, it doesn't try to earn money for its employees' retirement so much as it tries, as the state treasurer once proudly put it, to "mobilize the power of the capital markets for public purpose". It'll likely make the bankrupt New York City of the 1970s look like a beacon of prosperity and fiscal responsibility.

(There's other incompetence at work, of course.)

That is an unwarranted assumption offhandedly disguised as a fact: San Francisco is not, nor will likely become, ”the center of the US” — and is even outranked by a multitude of supposedly second-rate urban areas in terms of economic relevance.

>"Given SF is more and more the center of the US ..."

How is a small city(124 km2) with a population less than 900K people, that sits on the extreme edge of the U.S the center exactly?

Geography and population not withstanding, it's not the center for fashion, the arts, publishing, politics, finance or even tech as that distinction belongs to the peninsula.

I don't believe the perception of S.F as the center of the U.S is even remotely common.

Muni doesn't run this directly; it's contracted out to NextBus, a division of Cubic Information Systems since 2013. The NextBus web site says their vice president of engineering is Molsen Fahim.[1] But his LinkedIn profile says he left that job in March 2016 and moved to Cubic in another role.[2]

NextBus's interim general manager is Blair Brown, and his LinkedIn profile says he's been "interim" since 2015.[3] He was previously chief operating officer of Temple Beth El, a synagogue, and previously held some sales jobs, including being head of sales at NextBus in the past.

So there's the problem. Cubic bought a working system, the technical people left, and the sales types now in charge can't keep it going.

[1] http://nextbus.cubic.com/About/Management-Team [2] https://www.linkedin.com/in/mohsen-fahim-7035a34 [3] https://www.linkedin.com/in/brownblair

There is currently work going on to revamp nextbus in Cubic.

Source: I recently left a cubic subsidiary that was involved in this work.

Is it really Cubic's problem? The problem seems to be on Muni's side with outdated mobile equipment on the bus. Where operators are not quite as stupid, such as directly across the water in Oakland, NextBus continues to work.

More info. Muni is getting a new farebox system which includes location reporting. The old system was from Cubic, which no longer makes fare boxes. So the existing system is abandonware and the new system, from Genfare (formerly Johnson Farebox, from 1880) isn't in yet. Genfare is part of the conglomerate SPX, which purchased Genfare in 2012 and for which Genfare is a minor product line. So they'll probably screw up that business.

[1] https://sfbay.ca/2016/06/28/new-muni-fareboxes-approved-by-s...

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