Death, Maiming, Money, and Muni

To determine the extent of Muni's safety problem and the effectiveness of its response, SF Weekly spent four months obtaining and examining thousands of pages of public records, including internal transit agency reports, audits, and court files relating to lawsuits brought by accident victims; talking to the maimed, and to their attorneys; speaking with survivors of the deceased; interviewing a score of transit experts across the country; and scouring government databases for comparative accident data.

Public transit systems are studies in complexity. None is perfectly comparable to another. State and federal officials acknowledge that some of their transit accident statistics are unreliable, usually in the direction of underreporting. And broad statistics seldom provide a complete explanation for the causes of individual accidents. Keeping those caveats in mind, and even giving Muni managers the benefit of the doubt, the public record makes it clear that Muni accident rates are higher than those in comparable transit agencies.

Although hills, weather, street conditions, traffic flow, and other individual characteristics of different cities make it statistically difficult to compare the safety successes and failures of municipal transit agencies, the statistical benchmark most commonly used for assessing the relative safety of public transit systems, according to a wide variety of transportation experts, is the accident rate, or the number of collisions per million miles traveled. The figures used for the intercity comparisons in this article were obtained from officials at six transit systems selected, after consultation with transit experts, because they are similar to Muni in geography, population density, numbers of passengers served, budget size, fleet size, and modes of transit offered (i.e., motorbus, electric trolley, and light rail). Not all systems provided statistics in all categories.

In 2002, Muni had 109 accidents per million miles traveled. By comparison, the King County Department of Transportation, which serves the Seattle metropolitan area, had 38 accidents per million miles. The Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority had 35, Washington, D.C.'s Metropolitan Area Transit Authority 27, and Atlanta's MARTA just 25. From 1989 to 1999, Muni's accident rate increased by 11 percent (reaching a high of 124 four years ago). Muni's numbers improved after the agency redefined what it considered an accident, but Muni is still booking an accident rate that is more than twice what comparable systems report.

And Muni drivers appear to be getting worse at their job. In 2001, according to the most recent data available from the agency, Muni reported that the number of operators involved in one or more accidents increased by 8 percent over the previous year. And the number of operators with zero accidents was 200 fewer than in the previous year, an 8 percent decrease.

Ned Einstein, president of Transportation Alternatives Inc., a transit safety consulting firm, worked as a planner for many years in Los Angeles, Paris, and Washington, D.C. One of the country's leading experts on transit safety, he says he understands the concerns of the union drivers, the system administrators, and the public, and is familiar with Muni's safety issues. He says that Muni management does not draw appropriate conclusions from its accident data.

"There is a subtle blend of factors from which a high accident rate emerges," he contends. With too much overtime, he says, drivers become fatigued. Because the schedules are too tight, it is hard to enforce safety. Drivers cut corners to save time.

"It's a chain reaction," observes Einstein. "Things add up and make the driver's job tough."

Overall, he says, it just takes a lot of energy, intelligence, stamina, and attention to detail to be a safe transit driver.

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On Dec. 15, 1996, Emily Landsverk walked out of her Cole Valley apartment to buy burritos for herself and her boyfriend. A recent UC Berkeley graduate in anthropology, Landsverk, 26, was working as a legal secretary for the American Civil Liberties Union. At the intersection of Haight and Cole, she crossed the street.

Welton N.M. Beattie, a 12-year Muni veteran, was driving the No. 37 bus west on Haight Street. In a deposition, Beattie said that he felt a "bump." Then another. Something was in the way of the bus, he did not know what. He accelerated; bump again. According to a half-dozen witnesses, Beattie rolled the 15-ton bus on top of the obstruction and stopped. Angry, frightened passers-by pounded on the bus door, shouting, "Get off of her! Get off of her!" At that point, according to his deposition, Beattie looked in his side mirror, saw a body under his tire, and pulled forward.

Weeping from the pain of a crushed pelvis, Landsverk feebly tried to raise herself on her forearms. Beattie called the Muni dispatcher. A witness to the accident, Lorri Puente, who was on the sidewalk, testified in a deposition that the driver "was screaming about being disruptive of his schedule. And I kept a couple of people from going at him physically because they said, you know, 'What's wrong with you? You just ran over an individual twice, dragged her. Don't you have any compassion?'

"And he was a very angry individual. He says -- he said, you know, 'This is going -- I'm going to be late for my schedule.'"