The Overnight Broadcast

Muni Diaries posted a video of two women fighting on either the 30 or 9X, running through Chinatown, the other day:

What’s annoying the hell out of me are the number of people using it as their base for emotional rhetoric about how Muni isn’t safe. While it’s ridiculous to assert that Muni is one hundred percent safe, it just happens to intersect with my major peeve: The warped San Francisco perspective.

The attitude is a combination of younger residents with limited life experience outside the suburbs adjusting to city life, and big-city transplants from points elsewhere who haven’t quite adjusted to the way of doing things here. Speaking as someone who has been in both of these camps, the acclimation period is a lot longer than you’d think, to the point of taking years instead of months.

Add on top of this the outsider perspective (and one that we’ve encouraged) that San Francisco is some magical place instead of just a regular city with some extra-nice scenery and a more liberal-leaning population, people get disillusioned when it doesn’t live up to their unfounded expectations and boom, now you have the warped San Francisco perspective where everything is falling apart and nothing is ever good enough.

The perspective is traditionally unwarped by spending a week in one’s hometown but in today’s economy, who has the money to travel?

Look, Muni can and should be better. We shouldn’t have spray paint decorating the inside of our buses, and yes, that little shit who called me a faggot on the 24 the other week should be outfitted with a shock collar that I could activate remotely through an MTA-approved iPhone application (or Android, should your phone be an inferior model). But let’s not lose sight of the fact that the stabbings and the fights are making the news and blazing headlines because they’re not everyday occurrences.

In other words, calm down.

And in an obligatory semi-old-timer rant, if you think Muni’s got a crime problem today, just be glad you didn’t have to experience the early 90′s version of the transit system.