Supervisor London Breed is calling upon the SFMTA to explain what exactly went wrong during the NextBus outage.
Supervisor London Breed is calling upon officials from San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency to explain what exactly went wrong during the NextBus outage.
Breed said during Tuesday’s San Francisco Board of Supervisors meeting that it had been a difficult month for Muni and its riders because of the outage.
The outage left thousands of Muni riders at transit shelters and in the subway without any idea on when the next bus or train would arrive for weeks, said Breed:
“It left people waiting unfairly and unnecessarily in the cold, in the rain, and it shook confidence in the public transit system on which 700,000 riders rely on daily.”
Breed said she is working with the SFMTA in the coming days and asking for “forensic analysis” of what went wrong with the NextBus system and how the transit agency is going to improve the system moving forward:
“This should have never happened in the first place.”
Even when NextBus is working, Breed said the system still is inaccurate in giving arrival time predictions and the all too familiar “ghost buses” where NextBus will show a bus arriving, but the bus never shows up.
Breed said:
“Muni needs to do better.”
Officials at the SFMTA have said that the outage was due to the AT&T 2G wireless cellular network shutting off, which the telecom company planned for sometime.
The SFMTA wrote on its website that the transit agency knew of the shutoff of the outdated network in 2012, but had thought it had more time to upgrade equipment inside Muni vehicles.
For weeks, SFMTA staff and from NextBus have been scrambling to install new modems inside Muni vehicles as drivers pulls in at the end of the service.
Ed Reiskin, the SFMTA’s director of transportation, apologized to Muni riders last week.
SFMTA spokesperson Paul Rose told SFBay last week that the transit agency expects to restore 100 percent of arrival time predictions sometime this week.
Jerold serves as a reporter and San Francisco Bureau Chief for SFBay covering transportation and occasionally City Hall and the Mayor's Office in San Francisco. His work on transportation has been recognized by the San Francisco Press Club. Born and raised in San Francisco, he graduated from San Francisco State University with a degree in journalism. Jerold previously wrote for the San Francisco Public Press, a nonprofit, noncommercial news organization. When not reporting, you can find Jerold taking Muni to check out new places to eat in the city.
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TMobile was long offering free service for the IoT transition, they had poor tech help. I could have helped them.
yeah right London Breed only cares about phony talk because she wants to run for mayor. she doesn’t have a clue how to make Muni or NextBus better – nor does she care. She only cares about herself and grabbing cash for another campaign.
First and foremost, what we want is to have great transit service. Transit predictions are secondary to that and in large part it’s difficult to predict when a bus is stuck in mixed flow with private vehicles, manuvering around double parked trucks, and stuck behind blocked intersections. Should the prediction system gone down, NOPE, but what we should be doing is reviewing the NextBus contract and see what we’re getting, or NOT getting from that sub-consultant. Don’t let supervisors meddle in Transit, get it moving.