Every year, a random sample of Muni diesel buses must pass an inspection by the California Highway Patrol. In recent years, the agency always has made the grade. This is easier to do, however, when you alter the notion of a "random" sample. "There's always a way you can set things up to your advantage," says a longtime Muni manager with a laugh.
Preparing for a CHP inspection of 20 random buses, for example, you could ensure that your 20 best buses are the first out of the barn. That way, they'll be the first 20 back into the barn to be inspected. "When those coaches pull in, for the CHP guy, it's random. But you've already stacked the deck the night before," the manager continues. "That's how you'd do it. That's how I did it."
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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The California Public Utilities Commission, meanwhile, inspects Muni rails and rail vehicles. After blindsiding Muni last year by declaring San Francisco's rail system the state's worst, the CPUC and Muni entered into settlement talks. An agreement was recently announced: Muni will spend millions to improve its infrastructure — but, per the pact, need not admit to any wrongdoing nor that the improvements are a matter of "public safety."
Yet no higher authority — no CHP, no CPUC, no amalgamation of letters and power — oversees Muni's fleet of 313 electrical buses. For vehicles like Coaches Nos. 5427 and 7054, the agency is left to self-police. For years, Muni's QA Department internally inspected all of the agency's vehicles. But, according to QA Supervisor Ken Sapp, his department abruptly ceased inspecting rail vehicles in 2010, and hasn't done so with an electric bus since April 2011. Following a slew of personnel transfers, the entirety of Sapp's department has been reduced to two diesel inspectors and Sapp. Asked the logic behind this move, Sapp replies, "I don't think there is any logic behind it."
Based on reports obtained by SF Weekly, Muni's QA inspections were harder to game than the CHP's. A July 2009 assessment of LRV No. 1437 found more than 20 defects; the vehicle was pulled out of service. A 2009 quarterly inspection of six LRVs, none of which had traveled more than three miles since undergoing its 10,000-mile preventive maintenance inspection, revealed 52 total defects. What's more, weekly PMs for the cars in the six months preceding the QA inspection were found to be overdue by 10 to 58 days. All six vehicles were placed on hold.
When asked who is inspecting rail vehicles and electric buses now, Sapp said this is being handled via standard preventive maintenance inspections. This means Muni is relying on the procedures its own inspectors revealed were delinquent by up to eight weeks — on vehicles that emphatically failed. What's more, the frequency of not getting necessary replacement parts during these preventive maintenance inspections led Muni's top transit official to coin the term "incomplete PMs."
Glaring QA reports on failed vehicles were a problem for Muni. The solution appears to have been to downsize that department and do away with such reports.
A number of Muni vehicles — particularly its Czech-made electric buses and notoriously underperforming Breda light-rail vehicles — were breakdown-prone right out of the box. They are growing older every day. The last midlife overhaul for Muni's buses may have been in the early 1980s, and San Francisco's extreme transit conditions induce even well-kept buses and trains to age in dog years. A dwindling number of maintenance personnel are left to cope with increasingly complex machines. Those mechanics are further hamstrung by an inefficient, Atari-era parts-procurement system to service obsolete vehicles produced by defunct companies.
Duct tape and plastic bags, by comparison, are easy to find.
For some, there is a silver lining in the hiring freezes and attrition that led an understaffed Muni maintenance department to grow even smaller. Overtime, particularly on the rail side, has skyrocketed. Between 2007 and 2011, Muni's electrical mechanics shrank in number by some 15 percent, but saw their overtime earnings double from $3.2 million to $6.4 million. "The culture changed — people said, 'This is good! We can earn more OT,'" recalls Guzman. "So they started crafting artificial overtime. We were told to delay the work in a regular shift and leave it for overtime." He claims procedures such as brake jobs, a four-hour operation, were routinely left until workers had already clocked their eight hours of regular time. In one instance, Guzman says his shift supervisor directly told him not to repair a broken bus pedal — a three-minute job — because "if we start fixing these little problems, they'll expect us to fix bigger problems." Some electrical mechanics have more than doubled their $77,500 salaries, with a few banking nearly $210,000; six dozen take home $120,000 or more. Among electrical mechanics, one-fifth of the workers earn 50 percent of the overtime.
Despite a prodigious upturn in overtime, Muni's vehicles continue to break down at a prodigious rate — especially when contrasted with the nation's other large transit agencies. "City Trolley" lines for the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) fail every 7,645 miles — three-and-a-half times less frequently than Muni's best-performing rail vehicles. LRVs in Los Angeles require maintenance "roadcalls" every 17,926 miles — one-eighth Muni's breakdown numbers.
