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The 38 Geary and reality

​Brock Keeling in Curbed:

Steeling myself for Transportation Week’s worst rush-hour challenge, I expected-slash-hoped for a hellish commute aboard the sluggish and odorous 38-Geary. After all, when I rode this line daily on the regular nearly a decade ago, it was a jam-packed ride, a crotch-to-butt nightmare come to life.

This ostensibly simple line, which runs ramrod straight east to west from downtown San Francisco to the Outer Richmond, has gained a reputation over the years as the city’s most brutal trip in the during busy hours.

On average, it handles 55,270 average daily boardings, making it one of the busiest bus corridors west of the Mississippi.

Not having taken the 38 during peak hours in eons—living in downtown San Francisco does have privileges; namely, a lack of lengthy commute—I braced myself on an unusually warm Tuesday evening to tame the Geary beast.

Hopping on a 38 Geary Rapid at Fremont and Market at around 5:15 p.m. (the route’s initial stop) the first thing that struck me was the lack of queue. Where was everyone? No matter. I jumped aboard, took off my backpack, and scurried around rat-like to find a seat. However, there was no little need to fret as there were seats aplenty.

Strange.

Over the next few stops, sweaty commuters boarded the bus. Some but not many. It was hardly the sardine-tin crush I witnessed in bygone commutes. Many riders were able to take a seat. Many riders were able to stand comfortably. As we traversed Geary up to Van Ness, the border between Geary Street and Geary Boulevard, there was still enough room for riders to keep their backpacks on. (A major no-no. I digress.)

What rush? What’s happening? Did the rapture finally happen? Or was I on one of those rare rush-hour rides that slides in under the nightmare-commute radar?

As the bus approached the Masonic, I jumped off the coach frustrated and confused. An anomalous ride, I assumed. I went back a few stops and climbed aboard a regular 38-Geary line where, once again, I was met with a downright roomy commuting experience, one that bordered on serene.

Now I was pissed. This line proved too comfortable for rush-hour. Where was the steaminess of an broken NYC subway? Where was the existential anguish that the 405 gives Angelenos on a daily basis?

“SFMTA has been working to improve Geary service with initiatives like new low-floor buses and more frequent Rapid service,” SFMTA’s Erica Kato explains. “Red lanes heading on both Geary and Powell work have resulted in an improved trip-time and better experience for our riders.”

But that’s not all. The 38 still has ways to go. “Additional improvements are needed to meet rising transportation demands---so while your ride has improved, we have more work to do,” says Kato.

While there are some rides on the 38 that still bungle things up, the new and improved 38 Geary line is a sign that, indeed, some things can change for the better with SFMTA.

Now, if they can only get people to stop wearing their backpacks on the bus. That would be a true transit miracle.

Rob's comment:

The point of Keeling's piece is not, as Kato assumes, about the red lanes and travel time but about crowding on the #38. 

But sluggish travel time on that line has also been exaggerated in the past (see this and this). I'm not convinced that either the red lanes or the Geary BRT project are justified.

On backpacks: all passengers should learn to take off their packs and hold them in one hand while they hold a strap or pole with the other. Surely people in The City That Knows How can learn this simple courtesy.

See also Scott Wiener: Subways and "pixie dust."

Stanislav Petrov: The man who saved the world

Stanislav Petrov: 1939-2017

From the obituary in the NY Times:

Early on the morning of Sept. 26, 1983, Stanislav Petrov helped prevent the outbreak of nuclear war.

A 44-year-old lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces, he was a few hours into his shift as the duty officer at Serpukhov-15, the secret command center outside Moscow where the Soviet military monitored its early-warning satellites over the United States, when alarms went off.

Computers warned that five Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles had been launched from an American base. “For 15 seconds, we were in a state of shock,” he later recalled. “We needed to understand, ‘What’s next?’ ”

The alarm sounded during one of the tensest periods in the Cold War. Three weeks earlier, the Soviets had shot down a Korean Air Lines commercial flight after it crossed into Soviet airspace, killing all 269 people on board, including a congressman from Georgia. President Ronald Reagan had rejected calls for freezing the arms race, declaring the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” The Soviet leader, Yuri V. Andropov, was obsessed by fears of an American attack...

After five nerve-racking minutes — electronic maps and screens were flashing as he held a phone in one hand and an intercom in the other, trying to absorb streams of incoming information — Colonel Petrov decided that the launch reports were probably a false alarm.

As he later explained, it was a gut decision, at best a “50-50” guess, based on his distrust of the early-warning system and the relative paucity of missiles that were launched...

Historians who have analyzed the episode say that Colonel Petrov’s calm analysis helped avert catastrophe.

As the computer systems in front of him changed their alert from “launch” to “missile strike,” and insisted that the reliability of the information was at the “highest” level, Colonel Petrov had to figure out what to do. The estimate was that only 25 minutes would elapse between launch and detonation.

“There was no rule about how long we were allowed to think before we reported a strike,” he told the BBC. “But we knew that every second of procrastination took away valuable time, that the Soviet Union’s military and political leadership needed to be informed without delay. All I had to do was to reach for the phone; to raise the direct line to our top commanders — but I couldn’t move. I felt like I was sitting on a hot frying pan.”

...As the tension in the command center rose — as many as 200 pairs of eyes were trained on Colonel Petrov — he made the decision to report the alert as a system malfunction.

“I had a funny feeling in my gut,” he told The Washington Post. “I didn’t want to make a mistake. I made a decision, and that was it.”

Colonel Petrov attributed his judgment to both his training and his intuition. He had been told that a nuclear first strike by the Americans would come in the form of an overwhelming onslaught. “When people start a war, they don’t start it with only five missiles,” he told The Post.

Colonel Petrov was at first praised for his calm, but in an investigation that followed, he was asked why he had failed to record everything in his logbook. “Because I had a phone in one hand and the intercom in the other, and I don’t have a third hand,” he replied.

He received a reprimand.

The false alarm was apparently set off when the satellite mistook the sun’s reflection off the tops of clouds for a missile launch. The computer program that was supposed to filter out such information had to be rewritten.

Colonel Petrov said the system had been rushed into service in response to the United States’ introduction of a similar system. He said he knew it was not 100 percent reliable.

“We are wiser than the computers,” he said in a 2010 interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel. “We created them"...

Rob's comment:

This shows why it's scary of President Trump and his administration to threaten North Korea: it raises tensions and creates a situation where such mistakes become more likely: War With North Korea Starts to Look Inevitable.

See also The dangerous case of Donald Trump: Robert Jay Lifton and Bill Moyers on “A Duty to Warn.”