Coach 7054's disturbing history could have been revealed before a deadly accident — Muni's system allows mechanics confronted with a problematic vehicle to access the record and determine if they're the 15th person doing the same job for the 15th time, simply applying Band-Aid fixes to failure-prone vehicles. "But we never do that," says electrical mechanic Guzman. "There's no requirement to," adds diesel mechanic Cheney. "And if the computers are down, we can't."
Mechanics who emulate MacGyver in addressing fixes via duct tape may not be inclined to channel Dr. House in diagnosing puzzling and time-consuming mechanical mysteries. In fact, intermittent problems that induce drivers to pull a bus out of service often clear up by the time the vehicle reaches the garage, leaving overworked mechanics to shrug them off and push them back into service. Guzman notes that drivers regularly complain their "interlock" is malfunctioning; this is the system that automatically applies the brakes while a bus's doors are open. This happened twice with Coach 7054 in the month before its accident.
Joe Eskenazi (top), Christopher MacKechnie / publictransport.about.com (bottom).
The plastic has been atop Coach No. 5427 since early 2011; below, a properly maintained bus.
Courtesy of Dorian Maxwell
Internal Muni documents reveal that when drivers complain about bumpy rides from lumpy or bald tires like this, the tires are placed on the rear axles, where drivers cannot feel them.
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By the time a bus rolls into the garage, however, the interlock may be working just fine. It's only if the mechanic opts to descend into the pit and work under the bus that he can determine if a purported interlock failure is actually a symptom of the larger and more serious problem of "brake fading." This requires a serious investment of time. Time is money and at Muni, there's never enough of either.
At 4 a.m. every day, e-mails ricochet around Muni management's inboxes about fleet availability at the agency's various yards. Along with on-time data, "availability" is one of the statistics Muni fetishizes as a tangible way to measure performance. The Bay Citizen recently revealed that Muni's internal metric rounded down late bus or train arrivals of as long as four minutes, 59 seconds, to simply four minutes late — which the agency considers "on time." This boosted on-time performance by perhaps 13 percent.
There are more straightforward ways to boost availability.
"People are getting phone calls at 3:30 in the morning asking, 'Are you making the runs?' Lowly frontline supervisors are holding management by the nards in choosing what stuff to let out or hold back," says one longtime maintenance supervisor. "Nobody is going to chew your behind out if you send out stuff that's on the hold board" — the list of vehicles deemed not roadworthy. Guzman recalls one such supervisor issuing the "defer maintenance" order so often when yanking buses off the hold list and pressing them into service that it became a catchphrase around the shop. This is how vehicles with cracked windows or busted defoggers or bumpers held on with bailing wire, or far more serious problems, are pushed onto the streets. Mechanics noted rags being tied around 800-pounds-per-square-inch hydraulic lines to (unsuccessfully) plug leaks or stripped wires in train couplers being held together with tape for want of a 50-cent part and 10 minutes to install it. Even if vehicles conk out within minutes of leaving the shop, "availability" quotas still have been met.
Drivers who raise a stink about the condition of the buses they're driving, like Dorian Maxwell, create a problem that quickly reverberates upward to Muni management. Operators, by law, are required to inspect the state of a bus or train before taking it out to serve the public. Declining a suspect vehicle is, arguably, a job requirement, but it's also seen by many within the world of Muni as a subversive act. "The culture here is, if you don't pull the bus out on time, you are doing something wrong," says a veteran driver. In February 2011, driver Chris Coghlan refused a bus, and wrote on a report to his superiors that "the 7000-series coaches are in such disrepair, it is difficult to find one free of safety defects.... It took me over an hour to get a suitable coach." One day later he was written up for rules violations twice, the first two he claims he ever received. "They put you on a list," Coghlan tells SF Weekly with a wan smile. "They put Dorian on a list, too." Maxwell's firing in late 2011 did not go unnoticed by his fellow drivers. Muni declined to discuss specifics on an individual termination, but Maxwell claims he was accused of falsifying a time card. He denies this, and alleges he was targeted for his years of agitation on health and safety matters.
There are, however, carrots to go along with the sticks. "If the operators chose to, they could bring back nearly every vehicle and shoot pool until management provided a working one," says a veteran maintenance supervisor. "That's why management tends to coddle the drivers. Not because of union power. Because they choose to take out garbage every day — the computers don't work, the wipers don't work, the automatic braking systems don't work."
The bus Coghlan objected to is one of the 20-year-old relics Haley would rather see in Russia than on Russian Hill. One of these, Coach 7054, struck Scott Whitsitt. At SF Weekly's request, Guzman reviewed that report, which lists the vehicle's numerous defects in the days leading up the lethal collision. "This history was pulled up just because this bus got in an accident," the mechanic says. Then he shakes his head. "But every bus will have this kind of history. Every bus in the barn."
