Riders of San Francisco's often infuriating Municipal Railway -- known to locals as Muni -- have a new way of expressing their displeasure with service outages, delayed trains and late buses: Tweeting the man in charge.
With one click from the website MuniFail.com, riders can tweet Mayor Gavin Newsom with the message, "Hey, @gavinnewsom! I was late for work today because MUNI was broken."
The site is the brainchild of Mike Monteiro, a small business owner and Muni rider. Muni repeatedly has failed to get him from Point A to Point B in a timely manner, and the last straw came last month after a series of Muni blunders made him an hour and a half late bringing his son to school.
“What struck me the most about this, and other Muni incidents, isn’t the initial problem itself,” Monteiro said. What compelled him to get social media involved was a perceived “total lack of communication between different points in the system and the total lack of plan about what to do when breakdowns happen.”
San Franciscans always gripe about Muni, and with good reason. Service sucks, and there are several blogs like Muni Diaries that chronicle people's experiences, where frustration with the system often rules the narrative. The agency is facing its deepest budget cuts ever, and that means longer waits and more crowding. But Muni is iffy even in the best of times, and Monteiro has touched a nerve. Munifail.com went live last week, and Newsom already has received "several dozen" tweets, said mayoral mouthpiece Tony Winnicker. That said, "they haven't overwhelmed his Twitter account."
"He sees the tweets, and he shares riders' concerns about Muni," Winnicker said. "He understands the tweets are another way for people to vent their legitimate frustration right now."
There's good reason to be frustrated. Muni is threatening service cuts in the face of a $52.7 million budget deficit after the total elimination of state funding for public transportation. Could Newsom be getting a Twitterful of complaints that should be aimed at Gov. Schwarzenegger?
"I have no idea. I'm just a rider," Monteiro said, adding that the city "hasn't even attempted to pass the buck to the governor."
Still, in his view, all the funding in the world wouldn't help Muni.
"The major difficulties I see right now aren't budget-oriented or service-oriented. They're communication-oriented," he said. "The mayor isn't engaged in the problem so he's not communicating what's going on to his constituents."
For its part, the mayor's office wants riders' complaints going to the Guv because, it says, that's where the problem lies.
"Hopefully the governor is getting a lot of these tweets as well since it's the state, not San Francisco, that has abandoned public transit," Winnicker said. "The independent Municipal Transportation Agency Board is caught between a rock and a hard place and faces tough choices. If only tweets could help the system close that budget gap."
Photo: Flickr/Steve Rhodes
