Transit agencies across the Bay Area are offering New Year’s Eve revelers free rides and extended service to help them celebrate without having to get behind the wheel.For the 11th consecutive year, free transportation will be available on all San Francisco Municipal Railway trains and buses between 8 p.m. on New Year’s Eve and 6 a.m. on New Year’s Day.Muni will also extend Metro service between The Embarcadero and West Portal stations until 4 a.m., and will run extra buses on the Muni Owl lines between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m.
Read More
A 50-year-old woman who swung a dustpan at people and threatened officers with a bottle in San Francisco International Airport on Christmas Eve remains in custody at a mental facility after being detained, authorities said.Witnesses told police that at around 7:45 a.m., Los Angeles resident Angela Kay West grabbed a dustpan with a long handle from a custodian’s cart and started swinging it at customers in the Mezzanine Level Food Court in Terminal 3, according to an investigating detective from the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office.
Read More
As stranded travelers thaw out from the blizzard that froze the East Coast and closed three major airports, San Francisco is preparing for weather-related flight delays and cancellations of its own.
Though The City will not experience the extreme conditions that included 2 feet of snow and 60 mph winds along the eastern seaboard, heavy rains and fog starting today could make travel around San Francisco International Airport hectic.
Read More
A crash in the Sunset neighborhood Monday morning sent one motorcyclist to the hospital and disrupted the L-Taraval light rail line for about 30 minutes.A San Francisco resident driving a white Hyundai backed into a motorcyclist from Fremont reversing out of a commercial parking lot near 20th Avenue and Taraval Street round 11:06 a.m., according to police. The 42-year-old man driving the motorcycle was transported to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, police said.
Read More
Frustrated Muni riders forced to trek up the stairs at downtown stations might feel like the escalators are broken all the time — and they are not far off.There were 131 reports of broken Muni escalators through the first 11 months of the year, according to maintenance records obtained by The San Francisco Examiner. The statistics mean that once every 2½ days, on average, one of the machines was down — and that does not count the roughly 300 times that escalators were temporarily out of service due to routine maintenance.
Read More
The weather woes of holiday travelers coming to and leaving San Francisco continue to mount — and they are not over.
Blizzards on the East Coast led to the cancellation of dozens of flights for travelers trying to leave San Francisco International Airport on Sunday, and a new weather front coming to the Bay Area might cause more of the same later this week.
Read More
With the crowds, delays and dirty vehicles, traveling on public transit is stressful enough, but it can be compounded even further if the passenger has no idea where they are going.While it may be a while before buses become sparkling clean and trains are never late, Muni is at least trying to ease the burden of riders by making improvements to its signage and announcement systems.
Read More
This may be cold comfort if you are reading this while stuck on a stalled train, but Muni has actually had dramatically fewer delays in the past six weeks than it did before.September and October were disastrous months for Muni, a period in which light-rail vehicles stalled hundreds of times in The City’s subway tunnels. But Muni leadership said they now have a handle on the persistent breakdowns that were plaguing the system then, and service has been much improved.
Read More
It looks like it may be more than just new tolls contributing to the decline of Bay Area carpoolers.The number of multiperson vehicles crossing the Bay Bridge dropped almost 8 percent between the 2009 and 2010 fiscal years, a decrease that was more than twice as much as overall drop in bridge traffic. That drop-off does not factor in a new $2.50 toll that has caused carpooling numbers to further plummet.
Read More
SamTrans officials quietly launched the Clipper card this week, giving commuters who use multiple forms of a transit a new option.
All San Mateo County Transit District buses were set to start accepting the card — which allows riders to access at least seven public transit services across the Bay Area — on Wednesday, district spokeswoman Christine Dunn said.
“We’re doing a soft launch,” Dunn said. “Which means we will be accepting Clipper on all of our buses, but we’re going under the radar so far.”
Read More
URL: http://www.sfexaminer.com/archive/103?page=142&quicktabs_6=1
