Vallery Lancey

Hope is not a strategy, etc.

I think that bell curve of experience meme kind of applies here. Failures are inevitable, and you need to invest in the capacity to respond to them effectively (i.e. systems I vs systems II thinking). But “IDK we’ll handle stuff as it comes up” is just a blanket failure to invest.

Rasmussen's dynamic systems model. It shows a triangular relationship between economic failure, unacceptable workload, and performance failure, where systems need to be pushed away from each side with counter decisions/efforts.

I'm frustrated with how devops/SRE/whatever culture often shortcuts from "here's failure models that we may choose not to address as a cost/complexity tradeoff" to "some failure modes are just inevitable". Not habitually pushing away from the failure gradient means you drift more into failure.

"It's always DNS" is fun but gets reductive like DNS is a force of nature.

DNS failures are downstream of other interesting socio-technical failures, from missing validation to complex infra/DB/monitoring failures that spill over into a bad (or stale) DNS records (eg in many public cloud outages).

Hoping Hallie saw a ghost. 🙏

The response to a WILDLY popular program is to cancel it and put the money somewhere less effective. Thanks Carifornia.

Just saw, for the umpteenth time, people blaming shoddy product decisions about an app on the engineers building it, and not management who makes the decisions.

I’m fascinated by how much agency is attributed to software engineers vs any other line-employee profession. “Stupid devs decided _”, employees responsible for CEO’s politics, etc.

High salary/above average safety net doesn’t seem to fully cover it!

“Given absurd premise A, terrible situation B is rational“.

*everyone fights about B*

This is a cool model of fare “gates”:

- Cheap
- Not a bottleneck
- No problems with wheelchairs/bikes/luggage
- Where to pay the fare is obvious and easy

Yeah. I understand the fare evasion-busting incentive to force people to commit to paying or evading, but it sucks to have missed trains because deviating to a reader loses precious seconds.

I do wish Caltrain had more Clipper readers, or comically large arrows on the ground pointing to them. I regularly forget to tag on/off at certain station entrances that don't have a reader choke point.

Anecdotally, there's basically always a "forgot to tag" in my train car. The response... varies.

Amazing! Is that a two-person costume?

I’m proud of how the spooky L turned out! Always lovely to see so many families enjoying the Great Hauntway from all over the city.

Thanks to @sunsetdunes.org for all the work that goes into the Great Hauntway, and the support in getting the Spooky L authorized again.

A person in a witch costume decorating a Muni train with spider webs.

Come to Embarcadero Station by 12:50 for something spooky.

L Taraval headed to the Great Hauntway at ~12:55.

The amount of life I have spent waiting in traffic on this bus…

A dim photo of a metro station platform. Two people are waiting with suitcases in the corner. A blurred train streaks across the image, leaving ghostly lines.

Going Places

Glen Park BART, 2023

This is a great example of how the new Clipper 2.0 discounts will effect real trips.

The “transfer tax” for regional trips is punishing, especially when a lot of regional trips are a pattern of local feeder + regional train/bus + local bus to destination.

I’ll save on my 2-agency commute this way.

Finally!

Clipper 2 is so important, as it will allow:

💵No-cost/reduced cost transfers between transit agencies
💳Ability to pay with credit cards or your phone
⏲️30 min grace period for BART excursion fares

Note that if you want Clipper 2 immediately you’ll need to contact Clipper in December:

A lot of people seem emotionally attached to narratives of more independent or family-farm coded systems, and totally discount economics of scale. Not just with hardware and physical DCs, but the capacity and opportunity costs of optimizing any of the software stack.

us-east-1 is our library of Alexandria

The rabbit hole goes so deep when you factor in the extra environmental impacts and costs associated with battery-only buses (as opposed to hybrids, and trolly buses with backup batteries).

CA is so lobbyist-impacted, trolly buses haven’t even been prioritized.

Muni wants exemption from CA pollution rules. It's a no-brainer. SFMTA plans to beg relief from the state's zero-emissions mandate. It’d be crazy not to ask. It’d be crazier for the state to say no.

It’s great to see misguided mandates on public transit emissions go from a policy wonk topic, to getting real attention.

$$$ goes further getting more people on transit than switching to costly and unreliable battery-only buses.

missionlocal.org/2025/10/sfmt...

A large Malaysian flying fox hanging upside down from a branch, in an enclosure. It is stretching its wings, and looks sleepy. One wing has a tear that looks to be healing. There is a sleeping bat behind it.

A fuzzy friend.

The world is so filled with beauty and wonder and I feel very strongly both that it should be a kinder place to live in and that it is within our power to make it as such

My average annual cost for public transit is 1k.

(And the ebike amortizes to maybe $800 / year.)

BREAKING: The Governor signed our legislation to authorize a Bay Area regional funding ballot measure for transit.

SB 63 is critical to avoid massive service cuts at Muni, BART, Caltrain & other systems. We need to stabilize & modernize these systems for the Bay Area’s future.

Trying to figure out how to stop bluesky from double deep frying every photo I upload. 🙃

Sutro tower at sunset, seen from a distance. It’s a tall tapered metal tower with triangular symmetry, and three high points.

Sutro