If you thought Muni’s signage is confusing, wait ’til you get a load of their internal forms and spreadsheets! Hey, wait, where are you going? Don’t you want to know what you’re supposed to be outraged about?
Starting last week, Muni’s been posting daily reports on its website. In PDF, of course. With no RSS, of course. And they get deleted after a few days. And they sometimes take a few days to appear, which is a novel interpretation of the word “daily.” A+++++++ job, Muni! Would do business with again!!!!
Anyway, transit enthusiast Rachel Gorden says that the report comes with a “handy guide,” but we’d like to know what tea leaves she’s looking at, because these things look to us like an explosion at the Excel factory. For example, did you know that on April 20th, the daily runs missed at the Presidio facility was 5, and the runs missed were simultaneously 3 and also 4? Please make a note of it.
Okay, so the reports are at best impenetrable to the public, and at worst seemingly self-contradictory. But that’s not really a fair criticism, because they’re really not for the public. They’re for Muni insiders — according to Judson True at Muni, about 40 operations and senior staff look at them every day. And they’re also for Muni-watchers — the untold tens of individuals willing to put in the time to analyze the figures. We’re going to be attempting some trend analysis over the next week or so, and we’ll let you know if we find anything interesting. Because surely there MUST be something interesting to find in these fuckers.
For example, Rachel at the Chron was able to determine that last Wednesday, 65 people were absent for reasons other than sickness, vacation, or for miscellaneous “unplanned” reasons. Wait, absent for reasons OTHER than miscellaneous? Oh Muni, even when we can’t figure out what you’re doing, we’re outraged.
