Vehicles are rolling through the city with wires wrapped in plastic, bumpers secured with duct tape, and components held in place with rubber bands. These are the "fixes" Muni feels little compunction about putting in places the public can see. Glancing at photos of jury-rigged repairs, longtime Muni mechanic Michael Cheney laughs. "If you went to a restaurant and the windows were dirty, and the tables were dirty, and the utensils were dirty," he asks, "what do you think the kitchen looks like?"
When a driver pulls into the bus yard with a problem, she'll fill out a defect card and hand it to a mechanic at a central point called "the tower." From there, the "tower man" will manually enter the data from the defect card into Muni's computer system, noting, say, a blown headlight. He'll then inform his immediate supervisor, who assigns a second mechanic to deal with changing the bulb. That mechanic then ambles to the storeroom and requests the part from the shopkeeper.
Courtesy of Chris Coghlan
This metal piece provides roof access on electric buses. Should the rubber band used to keep it in place fail, a chest-high hook would essentially be protruding from the bus.
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So, if you're looking to answer the question: "How many Muni employees does it take to change a light bulb?" the answer is five. But the bulb hasn't been changed yet.
Assuming the part is in stock, the shopkeeper will hand it to the mechanic, but not before both logging the transaction on the system and having the mechanic sign an invoice for the part. The mechanic will then drive the bus to the "work area" and actually do the job. After that, he'll walk, perhaps a full city block (bus yards are large), back to his supervisor, inform him the job is done, and complete his "work order" both on the computer and on paper. This process takes about an hour. It requires multiple mechanics, earning mechanics' wages — and possibly overtime — to spend time filling out paperwork, punching data into computers, and driving buses. And that's assuming everything goes by the book: If the shopkeeper and mechanics' lunch breaks sync poorly, the process may take three hours. The actual changing of the bulb takes five minutes.
Light bulbs are among the roughly 21,000 parts Muni tracks in its system — a system that uses no bar-coding. In 1992, the year President George H.W. Bush was derided as out-of-touch for his apparent wonder when confronted with a bar-coding machine, Alameda-Contra Costa Transit implemented such a system for its spare parts department. For Muni, like President Bush, bar-coding remains a thing of wonder.
AC Transit spokesman Clarence Johnson gushes that bar-coding allows real-time tracking of parts and inventory. It eliminates the tens of thousands of daily keystrokes required on older systems and virtually does away with paperwork. Mechanics can know exactly what part went into what vehicle, and when. And AC Transit can order new parts automatically — the transit agency uses the same parts codes that worldwide suppliers do, and their computers can easily communicate.
Muni can do none of these things. Forests of paperwork and untold amounts of manual data entry are the hallmark of its system. Every part is assigned a nine-digit code that is unique to Muni and must be manually punched into the system ad nauseam. What's more, these codes change over time, leading to errors. "It went from one type of inventory system to another," says Armando Guzman, a 31-year Muni electrical mechanic who retired in 2011. "You ask for a pressure relief valve and they give you a headlight." Cheney, a frequent whistle-blower, has been advocating for bar-code automation for decades. An audit by the Board of Supervisors Budget and Legislative Analyst was incredulous that such a system wasn't in place, and that was in 1996. "If bar-coding and tracking of parts was ineffective, if it wasn't the smartest way to do business, why does every business in the country do it?" asks Cheney, a diesel mechanic. "They can do it at 7-11 when you buy a pack of gum. But not Muni."
This has consequences, even beyond the eons of wasted hours for which Muni pays its employees to bang on keyboards or fill out forms when they could be fixing things. Multiple veteran maintenance workers — who, like many current Muni employees, spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution — recalled an instance when light-rail vehicles began mysteriously failing. After weeks of lost service, costly experimentation, and mechanics futilely pulling apart and reassembling trains, the culprit was traced back to the storeroom. Without bar-coding to differentiate them, minuscule components intended for electric bus motors or train motors had been inadvertently dumped into the same parts bin.
In short, Muni's parts system is to efficiency and automation what the Sahara is to water parks. Haley notes this is a special burden for an agency like San Francisco's, which must scour the globe to unearth pieces for aging and exotic vehicles. In addition to eBay, components for the historic trolleys have been purchased from museums. Parts for the electric buses — like Coach 5427 — must be ordered from Eastern Europe. Yet unforeseen events on the other side of the world also can derail Muni. The Japanese tsunami left scores of electric buses high and dry because it disrupted the Asian supply chain.
