Letters

Lean to the Left
Peter Byrne's article on Muni ("Rewarding Failure," Dec. 2) displays a startling lack of balance. He talks to one driver and one driver only and, apparently, no administrators.

While I know from personal experience that there are many arrogant and incompetent Muni drivers (including the ones who think that their run includes a pit stop for coffee or shopping while a fully loaded bus waits for them), I believe that the majority are hard-working and conscientious.

According to Byrne, the union has too sweet a deal and is to blame for the current problems. However, the administration has the responsibility to call workers on the carpet for abusing benefits. It is the administration that ordered the disastrous Breda streetcars, foisted the unworkable and logically absurd "Proof of Payment" system on an unwitting public, and has tried to raise the price of a fast pass that would continue to include in-city BART service.

There needs to be massive firings at the management level. There needs to be pay cuts at the top. There should be an investigation (and possible criminal prosecution) of the officials who ordered these streetcars. And, most importantly, the drivers need to be placed in high administrative positions.

The problem is that the people who are in power do not have any experience working as drivers, so they do not know what problems occur and how to rectify them. I believe that the drivers are reacting to bad management attitudes, as well as from having to bear the brunt of systemwide failures whose cause lies with poor management decision-making.

Bring the drivers into the process. Make them feel as if they are doing something positive for the community. And they will do their part to improve the service. But we need to cleanse the management first.

Harry S. Pariser
Via Internet

Lean to the Right
Bravo for your fearless expose of Muni ("Rewarding Failure," Dec. 2, Dec. 9). It is refreshing to get investigative journalism without the usual leftist spin. This will certainly raise your editorial credibility with us readers who have been reading you solely for the arts and entertainment content.

Dave Dow
Via Internet

Stand Up to Labor
Many thanks to Peter Byrne for his aptly titled article "Rewarding Failure," which cut through to the heart of Muni's chronic performance problems: the union's vise grip on the city's public transit system. The sad state of Muni is especially shocking to me because I recently returned to the U.S. after three years in Prague, the Czech Republic, where the timetable for each bus and streetcar line is posted at every one of its stops. (I've never understood why the timetables aren't posted here.) The entire transit system runs more or less like clockwork. If the struggling economies of post-Communist Eastern Europe can run a working public transit system, can't we?

Byrne makes an excellent point that any mayor who truly wants to fix Muni will have to risk angering the unions, who could potentially call a crippling citywide transit strike. If a strike occurred, I wonder where the public sympathy would lie in this bighearted town.

If the union strikes, hire nonunion drivers and keep those buses running. I, for one, will be riding. Call me cruel, but I think that breaking the union grip on city transit is actually the kindest thing that can be done in this situation for the general populace of San Francisco and especially for its poorest and working-class citizens.

Adam T. Dingle
Lower Haight

Spite, Spite, Spite
Oh, those evil, bad, nasty unions. How dare they attempt to negotiate contracts to the advantage of the workers they represent ("Rewarding Failure"). And fie upon the guilty heads of Muni's bus drivers and mechanics for having the nerve to take time off from work that is literally backbreaking, spiritually draining, and almost totally unappreciated by the vast majority of their fellow citizens.

What an amazing piece of bile you folks coughed up disguised as some sort of revealing expose on Muni. I expect anti-union propaganda from the likes of the Chronicle or the Examiner, but I do sort of expect an alleged alternative newsweekly to avoid parroting the corporate line that it is labor unions that are to blame for all our dysfunctional society's ills.

Even more amazing was the almost total lack of actual thought that went into your little story. You simply spew figures at your readers with nary a shred of real analysis of the story behind those figures.

I'm no fan of Willie Brown. I could list a hundred reasons why he's likely to go down in history as one of the worst mayors this city has ever had, but I'm afraid I wouldn't place Muni's late buses or streetcars on that list anywhere. Your own story said it. Muni has been this way literally for decades. To expect one mayor to solve our transit problems in less than one term is just absurd and, frankly, stupid. Equally stupid, and mean-spirited, is your insistence that the workers themselves are to blame for late buses, equipment that doesn't work, and a plethora of other problems.