Thursday, April 26, 2007

T-THIRD TURN

The below video clip shows an outbound T-Third streetcar approaching on King Street then, turning left onto Fourth Street. This is one of the bottlenecks noted in the Muni Metro meltdown occasioned by the opening of the T-Third line last week.

If I were a streetcar passenger in a hurry to catch a train at the CalTrain station just across Fourth Street, my blood pressure would climb to aneurism level.




The entire clip lasts 114 seconds, almost two minutes. The clip ends just before the car pulls up to platform "B." Passengers are not allowed to disembark at point "A"—there’s no platform there. As you can see platform "B," where they can get off, is farther from the CalTrain station "C." So they wait two minutes in order to travel farther away (a couple hundred feet) from CalTrain.



This was shot around 11:30am yesterday (Wednesday) and all traffic was flowing smoothly in all directions. Imagine if you were on a streetcar just behind this one, watching the CalTrain train you wanted pulling away from the station.


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1 comment:

WillySF said...

As is typical of MUNI, we have another "design as you go" approach to public transit. Eventually the T Line should be operating to MUNI standards (pretty poor), compared to the way it is presently (abominable). Automobile traffic obviously still takes precedence to everything else in this city.