Yuri Hanker’s Whatever

It’s a little too long to review what they have been doing for a last quarter decade.

Last Saturday’s first community workshop for SFMTA’s Trasit Effectiveness Project was something like a school project presentation done by middleschool students. The presentation boards shown told me what I have known and what they have been known for a while. Is it the outcome of their 6-month project which budget is more than 2 millon bucks? It must be a joke. Yeah, it’s a bad one.

But good thing is that few taxpayers in San Francisco care about the expense for nothing. They had too much craps around the transit already and finally accept the existing facts through the daily routine. 

And what else? They hire "one of the best transit consultant in this country" while they won’t listen from workers and drivers working on the actual field? Awesome. So, the final outcome of TEP will be something that works perfect in virtual reality or on the desktop; it will fail on the real world.

Well, MTA should really understand these point below:

1. It is car traffic that slows down MUNI.
2. Trasportation consultant in the US sucks, based on what they have done so far.
3. There are guys doing better jobs in this kind of project.

I mean, there is the best one which MTA and MUNI should have hired: Toyota. What they are trying to do is exactly the same thing as what Toyota have been doing for last 50 years. Kaizen would give them simular effect to TEP without spending 2 million dollars. And now Toyota have worked with several clients outside of car manufucturing industry, such as Japan Postal Service, New Nagoya Airport (Centrair) and so on. They have done exellent job in cutting the operation cost and improving efficiency. Moreover, Toyota normally address what they think is the main problem clearly and loudly to everyone.

There is nobody more than Toyota who can do the better job in this kind of problematic situation; they can rebuild MTA and the troublesome transit system right away. 

Resources: 
San Francisco Transit Effectiveness Project 
Editorial: What Muni can learn from Portland - San Francisco Examinar (12/12/06)
【Muni】業務改善のためのTEP半年経過 - 海外LRTニュース・ひろい読み (Japanese) 

The delusional and the chickened rule VTA - VTA Watch

What the shady idea. After spending nearly 5 millon bucks, VTA and business leaders in the Silicon Valley will find that they waste that much of money for state-of-art trench with automatic trains used by no one.

The greatest point is that the item is brought into the other board in last month without staff’s recommendation^[1]. This is damn ridiculous; he superior board is set to reexamine what the lower board approves previously and reject the item if inappropriate. However, what VTA board did is something else. There are a few good men (Greg Perry and Supervisor Liz Kniss) who really understand these points while other 9 members are just sitting and afraid of cutting connections from business initiatives.

I am totally surprised at brainlessness of business leaders in the Valley. People should realize this; businesses are just selfish. They speak up only for what they want, and don’t care about the rest.

Or, are they are just blind for new gadgets which moves automatically? (Based on the operation records in these days, BART is no longer "new" and too unreliable to make people freak out, though…)   

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 [1] VTA Transit Planning and Operation Committee (11/15/2006) (Caution: it is PDF file.)