“Hi, good morning,” Stan Lui said once he was inside the car. “Passes, please. Transfers.”

Passengers began shifting in their seats. Some groaned, others rolled their eyes and one rider bolted out the one unmanned door.

Lui and his two co-workers, using handheld devices, scanned riders’ Clipper cards and Muni tickets and checked the date and time of transfers. Kevin Smith, 48, who scanned a woman’s Clipper card, found it had not been tagged and contained only 60 cents — insufficient for the $2 one-way fare. After some back-and-forth, Smith let her off at the Montgomery station platform.

“I will give you a chance,” he said. “Go load your card, ma’am.”

“Yeah, I’ll load it,” she said, walking away irritated. “I always do.”

Upon getting off, the three fare inspectors encountered a man lying against a wall between the two platforms with his belongings scattered on the ground. They asked him, too, for his proof of payment, and when he failed to come up with it, they escorted him out.

“Thank you for allowing your tax dollars to go here, asshole,” the distraught individual yelled from outside the fare gate doors.

“You’re f—ing this, you’re f—ing that,” said Sgt. Larry Nichol, supervisor for the other two men. “I used to keep a journal of what people say to me.”

In the nine months that Lui, 33, has been a fare inspector, his impression from the public he has direct contact with is they generally don’t like him and his colleagues in the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s Proof of Payment Unit.

“I hear from people that the No. 1 hated ones are parking control officers, police officers and fare inspectors,” Lui said. “That’s how I see it, because when people verbally abuse you, that means they don’t like you.”

Catch me if you can

The SFMTA began employing fare inspectors in 1999 as a pilot program with 18 inspectors who patrolled only railway vehicles. The pilot has since become a permanent, growing program with 13 new inspectors hired last year to bring the total to 55 — 33 men and 22 women.

Increased manpower and even more positions opening up as early as December have boosted the number and frequency of inspections in each of San Francisco’s 10 police districts. Up to 20 inspectors get deployed daily to a random district or districts within close proximity to each other.

“I call it spreading the love around because we don’t want to make it so that one group thinks we’re concentrating on them,” Nichol said.

Inspectors are catching fare evaders throughout The City and offenders aren’t race-, gender-, age- or income-specific. They’ve cited homeless individuals to men in fancy suits who keep a charged Clipper cards but don’t tag them.

“Sometimes you hear people go, ‘Do I look like a fare evader?’ And I say, ‘I don’t know, what does a fare evader look like?'” Nichol said.

Fare evasion results in an estimated $19 million of lost revenue annually for the SFMTA, and without the $6.5 million fare inspector program, that amount of money lost would be “much worse,” according to SFMTA spokesman Paul Rose.

Kathy Broussard, acting manager of the Proof of Payment Unit, which includes fare inspectors, said it is worth the cost since fare evaders get $109 tickets while paying passengers see that Muni’s policy, echoed by the on-board announcement, “Please pay your fair share,” is being enforced.

“It’s a win-win,” she said.

In her 7½ years as a fare inspector prior to managing the unit, Broussard said she once wrote 45 tickets in a day, and a fare inspector has issued as many as 65 in an eight-hour shift. At the end of their shifts on that recent weekday, Smith, Nichol and Lui had issued 16 tickets between them.

“Nothing is frowned upon. We don’t have a quota,” Broussard said. “What we have is a performance standard. We came out with an amount that a fare inspector would be able to produce within an eight-hour period and it’s very low — five. That’s less than one citation per hour.”

Currently, fare inspectors cover 6:30 a.m. to 11 p.m., but that doesn’t mean fare evaders are safe during their off hours. The Police Department has a surge team assigned to buses in different districts, on the lookout for crime as well as fare evasion.

Despite its challenges, the job — which under the new tentative labor agreement will pay $31.43 per hour by October and $35.54 by 2017 — draws thousands of applicants to the agency and is “highly competitive,” Broussard said.

A fare balance

Fare evaders can run, but can’t always hide.

On that recent weekday morning, after removing the man lying down on the Montgomery station platform, Lui, Smith and Nichol positioned themselves inside the fare gates to check customers getting off the trains. There, they recognized the man they saw earlier escape out the unpatrolled J-Church train.

“It’s funny how that works out,” Nichol said as Smith approached the man. Learning he was a visitor, Smith gave him a break and let him buy a ticket.

On the F-Market and Wharves line, which, like other above-ground vehicles, inspectors try to hold for less than a minute, Smith encountered San Francisco resident Reina Martinez, 42, who told Smith she had accidentally taken the wrong Clipper card while rushing out in the morning. She showed him paper résumés she had with her to apply for jobs. Smith said she could explain her case to a hearing officer and wrote her a ticket.

“This can’t be,” Martinez said in Spanish. “I think he should have been a little more flexible.”

On the same streetcar, San Francisco resident Mona Shath, 42, smiled as Smith scanned her Clipper card.

“It happens very often and I guess it slows things down but you have to pay,” she said. “I do hate to see people who can’t afford it suffer.”

Inspectors sometimes make exceptions for patrons who didn’t pay but whose Clipper cards show a history of paid fares, and for tourists who can show an itinerary.

But sometimes, issuing a citation is necessary, said Smith, who has seen offenders develop a new respect for the work that the unit does.

“When people are upset, they’re not upset at me the person, they’re upset at me the uniform, so I don’t take it personally,” Smith said. “That gets me through my day.”

http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/you-better-have-a-ticket-to-ride-muni/Content?oid=2875706

Only small rocks – occasionally a large slab of concrete – periodically tumbling down a crumbled wall 47 feet below ground level as “Big Alma,” the second of two tunnel-boring machines excavating San Francisco’s first new subway in nearly a half-century, slowly peered its cutterhead out Wednesday.

A few dozen neon-vested, hardhat-fitted workers on the project — from the contractor’s foremen to the resident engineer representing The City to the Central Subway head tunnel design engineer Matt Fowler — stood hypnotized by the spinning cutterhead, nudging forward at 10 to 25 millimeters a minute.

From the mid-afternoon when the top of Big Alma’s approximately 20 foot-diameter head appeared at the retrieval shaft in North Beach at the old Pagoda Theater site, workers on the project recorded video and snapped pictures on smartphones. Even through a pause of a few hours between shift changes and the erection of a new tunnel ring, they waited, chatting among each other about the project, at times simply observing and smiling.

“It’s like giving birth,” said John Fungi, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s Central Subway program director, with a chuckle.

No city dignitaries were on hand for the milestone, but they will be for today’s official recognition of the achievement.

Also braving the wait Wednesday, Fowler — who at 11 years is one of the longest-serving workers on the project — joked, “I didn’t think it was going to go into the night, or I would have brought fireworks.”

The first glimpse of Big Alma came around 3:30 p.m. and the machine remained barely visible for a couple hours. The forward push halted while a new tunnel ring had to be erected.

Operations restarted shortly before 9 p.m. and went on until just after 10 p.m., leaving the top third of the cutterhead visible, marking the end of a decade-long push to extend the T-Third Street line from near AT&T Park 1.7 miles north into Chinatown.

Project manager Ben Campbell, 36, with the contractor Barnard Impregilo Healy, celebrated by popping a Champagne cork into the retrieval shaft.

“It was a big weight off everybody’s shoulders,” he said. “It’s nice to be done.”

The project involved carving two tunnels along 4th Street and north under Stockton Street, a southbound one by Big Alma that took about 8 ½ months and an already completed northbound one by tunnel boring machine “Mom Chung” that started in June 2013 and took 11 months.

“We got here faster than we thought and pretty much without incident,” said SFMTA Transportation Director Ed Reiskin.

Of the Central Subway’s nearly $1.6 billion overall cost, the tunnel-boring project was part of a $234 million contract given to Barnard Impregilo Healy.

The breakthroughs of Big Alma and Mom Chung represent the end of excavation, a milestone in the project that started as a concept in 1996 in Chinatown. Originally, one tunnel would have gone under 3rd Street and the other under 4th Street, but officials settled on a 4th Street to Stockton Street alignment. While much of the Chinatown community advocated for the subway, dissenters including the group Save Muni criticized the costs and need for it altogether.

Central Subway, with stations at Union Square and Chinatown that have yet to be built, is slated to open to the public in 2019. Talks of extending the subway for a North Beach station and all the way to Fisherman’s Wharf are being studied. Meanwhile, the tunnel boring machines will be torn apart and extracted piece by piece with cranes and sold back to their manufacturer, which may refurbish them for future projects.

“We shouldn’t stop here; we should go to Fisherman’s Wharf,” Funghi said. “Why stop a good thing?”

On first impression of Big Alma’s breakthrough Wednesday using a laser device, survey manager Klaus Herbert, 48, could tell that tunnel boring alignment came within an inch of the design. Any deviation on the tunnel had to be less than four inches.

“They’ve set a new standard was set for tunnel boring,” Fowler said.

It was the work of a team of a dozen miners per shift.

The day before Big Alma reached the surface, The San Francisco Examiner toured the underground operation as the mining was happening. Workers maneuver different components of the 350-foot machine to its constant hum, in a more than 80-degree humid environment.

In the cab, tunnel boring machine operator Bob Driskell, 54, shifted his eyes between more than half a dozen computer screens, pressed buttons and turned nobs guiding the machine and monitoring the earth pressure balance, which he said, “is our lifeline” because it keeps structures and buildings above ground intact.

His goal, for his 12½ hour shift, was to keep a good soil condition with maximum mining speed and minimum torque.

“There’s an art to getting everything just right,” Driskell said. “We call it the sweet spot.”

As he moved the machine forward, grouters, including Joe Montoya, pushed buttons controlling jacks that put grout, a mixture of cement and water, to fill the space between the tunnel ring segments and the ground.

Foreman Jeff Carpenter, 52, was in charge of walking back and forth and making sure everything stayed running. On Tuesday, Big Alma was excavating through a tight curve, causing the equipment some problems.

“Everything wants to jump off the rail,” Carpenter said. “The conveyer belt tries to turn over upside down. We’ve got our hands full.”

Tunnel boring machine mechanic Kory Sepulveda, 36, used big wrenches, come-alongs and porta-power to make adjustments along the way.

“I love doing what I do,” he said. “You know if anything was to go wrong, you know they got your back.”

“Mom Chung,” which bore through on June 2, took longer initially and got sped up to 10 to 12 four- to five-feet tunnel rings per day, which it did with Driskell’s guidance.

“We had our learning curve on the first machine and the second machine went well,” said Assistant Superintendant Andy Granger.

While Big Alma’s breakthrough was gradual, Mom Chung’s was not even visible to crews who watched. The retrieval shaft was flooded with muddy water to protect it from any unanticipated material incidents.

Shift engineer Glenn Strid, 27, who worked on Mom Chung until its final weeks, reflected on the first breakthrough as he watched the second.

“Mom Chung had already broke through the shaft but it was very anticlimactic, so we said turn the foam on and sure enough, bubbles come out,” he said. “This was way cooler for sure.”

http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/sf-central-subway-tunnel-boring-phase-reaches-milestone/Content?oid=2822900

They know each other well enough to line up following a system that lacks public signage, but rarely engage in conversation. Here they wait to catch a ride to work, but this isn’t a casual carpool line. This is an invitation-only club.

Some wear earbuds and almost all are engrossed in their smartphones until their free ride arrives, rarely more than a couple of minutes late — a two-story white bus with tinted windows, plush seats and Wi-Fi.

Patiently, the residents wait to get on, and with the flash of their company badges are welcomed aboard. Then the luxury “GBUS TO MTV” shuttle shuts its doors and heads straight for Google’s headquarters in Mountain View. The scenario repeats itself in half-hour intervals at the stop and at dozens of similar Muni stops citywide.

These commuter shuttles whisk workers to the land of tech gold in the South Bay, and many employees prefer them to driving alone or taking Caltrain, but anti-displacement groups have seized on the buses as a symbol of The City’s growing economic disparity, a harbinger of skyrocketing rents, gentrifying neighborhoods and an eviction “crisis.”

On one recent morning, a Google-bound bus left The City with the words “just gentrified — not evil” written in dust on its rear. Another morning, a bus had hearts drawn in the dust on its windows.

The Muni bus stop at 24th and Valencia streets was the site of an April 1 protest in which protesters with the group Eviction-Free San Francisco blocked a Google bus and handed out fake “Gmuni” passes, suggesting that any local should be able to board the luxury shuttle. The hoax highlighted the protesters’ outrage that the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is pursuing a pilot program allowing commuter shuttles to use 200 public bus stops for $1 per stop per day, while the Muni system remains underfunded and unreliable.

A 2012 analysis by research firm ICF International for the Metropolitian Transportation Commission, which informed the SFMTA’s commuter shuttle pilot program, estimated that shuttles eliminate 43.3 million vehicle miles traved and 8,600 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions each year in Bay Area counties. An estimated 35,000 boardings occured per day, based on information complied by the SFMTA that year.

“I imagine [the numbers] may have grown,” SFMTA project manager Carli Paine said.

But such studies have not swayed anti-displacement activists who filed an environmental appeal against the pilot program allowing shuttles to use Muni stops for a fee. The Board of Supervisors rejected their appeal hours after the April 1 Google bus blockage, and some of the appellants — including Service Employees International Union Local 1021 — filed a lawsuit May 1 to stop the program.

The SFMTA still aims to launch the program July 1 and will start taking applications from shuttle providers in June, Paine said.

“Clearly, the companies have made a decision that [shuttles are] a wise investment of their resources,” said MTC spokesman John Goodwin. “And I think that’s all for the good.”

For many people, the shuttles have become the manifestation of all that’s right or all that’s wrong about the new San Francisco. But for those thousands of tech workers who climb aboard every morning, they are something else, too, something a little less heavy and fraught — a way to get to work.

In light of this, The San Francisco Examiner compared the morning commute time of the Google bus to taking public transit or driving. A reporter and photographer trailed the bus in the carpool lane one morning to Google’s gate, and on other days made the same trip driving without the carpool lane and timed the trip taking Muni, Caltrain and the “last-mile” shuttle.

Taking a Google bus instead of driving alone from the corner of 24th and Valencia streets to the tech giant’s headquarters 34 miles south saved a mere seven minutes, and public transportation including Caltrain took just 12 extra minutes.

The time gap between modes of transportation is notable, but not substantial. The civic argument for commuter shuttles is that they take single-occupant vehicles off the road and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

On its website, Google says about 5,000 Google workers take shuttles to work on any given day, and that the program hit 1.8 million rides in 2012.

“In addition to an ultracomfortable ride, real-time location information, and wifi, our shuttles have the cleanest diesel engines ever built,” the website boasts. “In fact, Google is the first and largest company with a corporate coach fleet to exceed the EPA’s 2010 bus emission standards. They run on 5% biodiesel and are fitted with filtration systems that eliminate many harmful emissions, including nitrogen oxide.”

Google would not speak with The Examiner, and multiple calls to We Drive U Inc., the shuttle that provides the rides for Google staff, were not returned.

Google employees waiting for the shuttles also declined to comment.

Brendon Harrington, the tech company’s transportation operations manager, told UC Berkeley graduate student researchers Danielle Dai and David Weinzimmer last year that shuttles are usually limited to three pick-up stops per route and up to five drop-off points on campus. Those that run express routes have just one pick-up and drop-off, the study stated, which contributes to time savings.

A faster travel time is one of the main attractions of shuttles, Dai said, adding, “People might consider shuttles as being in opposition of traffic, but we want to suggest that they’re complementary.”

Egon Terplan, regional planning director for San Francisco-based think tank SPUR, said the corporate shuttles are a key component of the region’s traffic ecosystem. The highway system connecting San Francisco to the Peninsula would break down from congestion if it weren’t for Caltrain, and also if everyone working at companies in the South Bay chose to drive solo, he said.

Instead of seeing the shuttles as a symbol of disparity, some say they are indicative of people’s desire for alternatives to driving alone.

“We as a region are better off by having a variety of ways to get around,” Terplan said. “The shuttle fits into the equation of providing another alternative and it moves people more efficiently.”

SCHLEPPING TO SILICON VALLEY WITHOUT A HIGH-TECH BADGE

Citing “security reasons,” Google does not allow non-Googlers on its shuttles, but The San Francisco Examiner trailed one shuttle from the 24th and Valencia streets Muni stop as it headed east on 24th Street, turned right on Van Ness Avenue, left on Cesar Chavez Avenue, took the on-ramp onto U.S. Highway 101, exited at Rengstorff Avenue and made its way to the campus.

The bus left promptly at 7:52 a.m. and made its first stop at Google at 8:56 a.m. Sixty-four minutes.

On another weekday, The Examiner duplicated the journey, leaving at the exact time, but without the privilege of carpool lanes, and arrived at 9:03 a.m. Seventy-one minutes.

The same trip on public transit starts with the 48-Quintara/24th Street bus scheduled to depart at 7:50 a.m. According to Google maps, the bus should arrive at 8:17 a.m. at 22nd Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, where a Caltrain baby bullet trip departs two minutes later on a 39-minute ride to the Mountain View station. A “last-mile” Google shuttle picks employees up at the station for a roughly eight-minute ride that should stop at the campus by 9:06 a.m. Seventy-six minutes.

Traffic and other variables may vary, but comparing these trips, the commute was seven minutes shorter by shuttle than driving alone, and 12 minutes shorter than taking public transportation.

Departure time makes a difference as traffic dies down after the morning rush. The commute on Highway 101 was even shorter departing 24th and Valencia streets at 8:30 a.m. A carpool lane begins about two-thirds of the way through the trip at Whipple Avenue off-ramp in Redwood City and requires two or more people per vehicle from 5 a.m. to 9 a.m. only, so it is open to all vehicles by then. Fifty-five minutes.

And the trip is even shorter leaving at 9 a.m. Forty-eight minutes.

A travel time comparison conducted by UC Berkeley graduate students Danielle Dai and David Weinzimmer last summer used a different methodology but yielded similar results.

Their study, Riding First Class: Impacts of Silicon Valley Shuttles on Commute & Residential Location Choice, calculated shuttle travel times at the noncongested driving time escalated by 40 percent, plus seven minutes of walking to access the shuttle stop and five minutes for loading and unloading. A trip from a stop at 24th and Guerrero streets, a block away from the starting point of The Examiner’s trip comparison, to the Google headquarters took the same amount of time — 64 minutes.

The UC Berkeley study calculated transit travel time as seven minutes of walking to access the shuttle stop plus the travel time for arrival at the destination Caltrain or BART station by 9 a.m. on a Monday morning, plus a three-minute transfer and drive time for a last-mile shuttle to the corporate campus. It amounted to 90 minutes to arrive at Google, 1.4 times longer than the shuttle time.

For Apple, Facebook, Genentech and Google, the largest tech employer, transit plus a last-mile shuttle took on average about 1.3 times as long as shuttles alone, according to the study. While it did not include solo driving time in the comparison, Weinzimmer said it would be “very similar” to shuttle times because there aren’t many carpool lanes heading down to the Peninsula.

CALTRAIN ISN’T WORRIED ABOUT LOSING BUSINESS

For more than a decade, Caltrain’s Go Pass program has allowed companies to purchase annual unlimited-ride passes for its eligible employees. And some companies have long arranged for “last-mile” shuttles to ferry workers from the train stops to their corporate campuses.