I'd forgotten to mention the adventure I had getting to meet Craig for dinner the other night.

We were meeting on a Friday night at a Union Street restaurant. So here's the challenge: how to get there? I could drive but there is no parking near Union Square. I'd have to find my way to the very over priced (~$15) Union Square garage. Plus, it was Critical Mass night. Critical Mass happens the last Friday of every month. It's a civil disobedience protest to show the world what it could be like if there were more bicycles than cars in downtown San Francisco. (only San Francisco would have a scheduled night for civil disobedience). Bicycles meet at Embarcadero Plaza and then start riding. There's no destination. It's all quite random so there's no way to plan for it. Traffic helicopters hover overhead & try to forecast where the bulk of the riders will go. Wherever they end up is sure to be one large traffic jam. I thought the chances of being stuck in a Critical Mass traffic jam were quite good so even without the disincentive of expensive and hard to find parking, I opted to not drive.

My usual way to get downtown is to take Muni, San Francisco's underground subway system. However, Muni just installed a new signalling system to improve service.The signalling system improved service so much that a 10 minute ride from my house was now taking 1.5 hours. Trains were getting stuck in tunnels so about once/day, someone will pull the emergency release and everyone will get off the train in the middle of the tunnel and walk to the nearest station. That only makes the train traffic slower than the signalling system allows.

Last week, one of the SF papers did a race between reporters. They put one reporter on Muni and the other on foot to see who would get to the end of the line first. It was a tie. Muni didn't sound like a good idea, either. Now I realized the advantage of living in a City with 5 different public transportation systems which do not interconnect. If there's a problem with one, then the other system is likely still running. BART, Bay Area Rapid Transit, was unaffected by the new signalling system. I could take BART from near my house to the Powell station, just a short walk up the hill from Union Square. so that's how I got to dinner with Craig last week.

Muni is still having problems. This weekend, a driver left his train to take a break and the train took off without him. the train went three stops before someone realized there wasn't a driver. No one was hurt.

Stacey