the train

On a daily basis, I commute through San Francisco on one of the light rails.

Obviously, there are perks- some run all night, the price (even though $55 feels like a lot of money for a one month pass at times, compared to the rest of the country it's about as cheap as you can get) the "regularity" of arrival times, and the security.

However, on the downside, it's usually never an easy or quick ride. It always takes an hour to get completely across town, for a city of only 8 square miles it essentially means that doing down town it never averages more than 3 miles per hour. In the past week, 3 days have been an issue, which usually means I'm late for work and look sketchy, like a drug addict or something always showing up late. One day at midday, the bus didn't come for 30 mins, things like this are especially common on Mondays and Fridays. In all honestly, the nextmuni website and the phone never match, which also never matches to the exact arrival times. Ghost trains appear on a daily basis, and I don't understand how they are missed, given the satellite technology and given just how large these machines are. A day before that the bus arrived on time, but was met with a standstill of about 3 or 4 trains waiting behind a broken train at a major intersection. Profoundly inconvenient. Then, 2 days before that it was case of a bus that wasn't what it says it was, where a bus changes route midway through its commute.

Being on time is generally the case, the problem is that if any of too many variables just go a little bit wrong, it can double the travel time immediately. Is this a case of chaos? Where very small differences in input into a system have vastly different outcomes?

The major changes and cuts set to take place on 12/5/09 are not going to be met with much hospitality, especially considering the upcoming holiday season.