notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

Literature In Transit

A couple of weeks ago, I popped along to the fourth installment of Muni Diaries Live, a series of talks about the San Francisco public transit (to use the American English) system.

I certainly found it interesting, even though the venue was slightly too full to make it really enjoyable. The talks covered the gamut from sex, to violence, community, songs (in the style of a sea shanty), comedy, and even a segment from the outgoing head of PR for the system. All of the speakers (performers?) were fantastic, even the brave members of the public who had a couple of minutes each after the interval.

The whole thing felt deeply, deeply different to anything I’d imagine in London, where the Tube has (with a very few exceptions) attracts what interest it does from, frankly, engineering nerds. (I count myself firmly in this category.) Perhaps it’s because it’s reliable, and covers most of the city more or less comprehensively. Possibly it’s the famous English reserve, where even after a few minutes stuck in a tunnel the most that’s acceptable is a loud tut or sigh. (It’s the done thing to ignore kids with mobile phone speakers, too, no matter how annoying they are.) It might even be that we just price the crazy people out of the system.

In contrast, in SF it sometimes seems notable if a train deigns to turn up. The buses are full of talkative… eccentrics, let’s say, and the cut-back Metro system means they run at capacity more often. The combination of a lack of engineering variety and a more storied life inside the vehicles seems to have left the city with a heritage of talking about the strange thing that happened the last time you dared to set foot on the 14 Mission.

It’s an interesting change for me, as I struggle to learn anything at all about the Breda-built LRVs that took over from Boeing’s awful mid-’70s stock, and all the more odd given the otherwise deeply geeky outlook of parts of the city. Still, file it under “just another difference.”