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Comment by archagon | Hacker News Reader

It’s just a straight up lie to call the Muni “painfully slow” and “dangerous.” I ride the trains every day to and from the Mission and rarely encounter any issues. Trains come every 5-15m, depending on time of day; not sure where the “joke” is here. To me, the experience is quite comparable to light rail in places like Amsterdam, Brussels, and Melbourne, except that we have a lot less of it.

BART is a bit more grimy but hardly less safe than e.g. the NY Subway.

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It is painfully slow. If you have to ride Muni on at grade sections it is a complete joke. I lived for more than 10 years with my front door opening to the T and a job at Embarcadero. Straight shot on the T (this was prior to central subway opening, an event I was waiting for the entire time I lived there). It was so bananas slow and unreliable that I exclusively biked, even when raining, since it was so much faster and I actually could rely on even getting there. I gave up on it entirely pretty quickly. I felt terrible for anyone who couldn't bike who actually had to rely on that garbage system.

God forbid you have to switch lines on your surface street burdened route, good luck.

The last time I risked it and tried to T home from an event (very against my better judgement), some sort of "security incident" happened, causing them to stop and unload the entire train and keep it stopped it there blocking the tracks entirely in that direction for investigation. I walked 30 minutes home. Very fitting final ride capping my decade+ of disappointment with that pathetic excuse for a train.

Muni access was one of the selling points to move where I did, I still get depressed/pissed thinking about how terrible it actually was! There is a tiny corridor served by underground Muni which is functional, but it's such a small fraction of the whole system.

You are welcome to your preference, paaaaaatttiiiiiieeeeennnnnccccce and experience. I'm truly glad it works for you. I use the system when I have to - it's dangerous often enough and slow enough and unpredictable enough that it's only "when I have to" - usually for self inflicted issues of parking and cost and unpredictability of Uber/Lyft itself. That's the problem with "dangerous often enough" for example: you can't tell before getting on a vehicle whether that will be an exception or the rule and you plan based on the general experience. Which is not good for me.

The timetable joke is because of its uselessness for planning switches or choices from one line to another, all the way to entirely missing vehicles. If you need transfers, you try and use a real-time app and you better be extremely agile with it. Good luck to the rest of us.

What do you mean by “dangerous”? I can’t even recall the last time I encountered some sort of major disturbance on a Muni train. Transfer-wise, the worst case scenario is that you’ll end up waiting 15 minutes for the next train, but it’s pretty unlikely. (And this is something easily solvable with more trains.)

Perhaps most importantly, though, Muni is 10x cheaper than ridesharing as well as far more egalitarian. Paying $10-20 to get anywhere in the city is just setting a pile of money on fire.

> far more egalitarian

I would rather that some don't suffer than everyone suffer equally

Well, I’d rather we invest in infrastructure that can benefit all of us rather than just ferrying the bourgeoisie around. If they see this as “suffering,” then maybe they can just move to Texas?

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