Back in the 1970s, Muni general manager Curtis Green hit upon the idea of handing out pins emblazoned with the logo “Muni loves you.”
The ‘70s in San Francisco was a wild time, and it’s hard to comprehend what people were feeling if you weren’t there. But in the years since — and now — it’s hard to say that San Francisco loves Muni back.
If Muni still loves us, this is an appallingly codependent relationship, on par with the one in “The Giving Tree:” We take and take and take and take from Muni, and leave only a stump. Other city agencies balance their budgets by raiding Muni’s. San Francisco political leaders have called for making Muni free for greater and greater swaths of the population, but rarely back that up with funding.
As individual riders, we often complain about inconveniences suffered on a public transit trip that, in many other mid- to large-sized cities, would’ve been inconceivable. Paying for the bus these days feels a bit like watching cars approach outer neighborhood stop signs: You’re pleasantly surprised when you see people actually following the rules. Muni is not loved. It is, at best, tolerated.
So, it’s troubling to think that, in the not-too-distant future, we may look upon the current state of things as the good ol’ days. Without directed funds in the forthcoming state budget — funds that are not presently in place — Bay Area transit agencies are promising draconian cuts of the sort that would cripple public transportation and render it ever more irrelevant to all but the most desperate riders.
Sen. Scott Wiener, who is driving the bus on securing these funds, says statewide public transit could be bolstered for around $1.2 billion a year (California’s yearly budget, as a point of context, exceeds $300 billion).
“I think we have a shot at getting what we need,” assesses Wiener. “It’s a very doable number.”
So, if Wiener succeeds, Muni will be saved — but only insofar as it won’t rapidly fail and become irrelevant. The biggest buy for this state money would be time. Muni would have time to figure out what San Francisco public transit needs to do in 2023, and how to reconfigure service to accomplish that.
State money would buy time for every California transportation agency — and every agency needs to rethink its raison d’être. And that goes, perhaps most of all, for BART. Because when you talk to experts about Bay Area transit, they’ll concede Muni is facing a crisis — but BART is facing an existential crisis.
Or as one put it: “Yeah, BART is totally fucked.”
All it took was one global pandemic for BART’s greatest strength to become its most crippling weakness. BART’s “farebox recovery,” the percentage of its operating expenses recouped by passengers’ tickets, stood at 60 percent prior to the bottom dropping out in 2020. That’s among the highest in the nation (Muni, as a point of contrast, was at 17 percent prior to the pandemic, and hit a recent high-water mark of 34 percent in 2013).
Lots of stuff about transit and transit funding is complicated, but this is not: If you’re making the bulk of your money based on ticket-paying riders and, suddenly, everybody stops paying and riding, you are totally fucked. A lot of BART’s additional money comes from sales taxes, which are also an extremely volatile funding source.
But it gets worse. BART, as former longtime board member Tom Radulovich puts it, exists, in large, part to funnel workers and shoppers from the Bay Area’s outer suburbs into the FiDi and Downtown of San Francisco. When Radulovich stepped down from the BART Board after 20 years in 2016, fully two-thirds of the service’s trips were to downtown San Francisco.
The agency and downtown San Francisco have a symbiotic relationship, for richer or for poorer. Now would be poorer; Downtown, as you all know, is in a bad way. The predictable 9 a.m. surge into and 5 p.m. surge out of a realm entirely devoted to office space is gone, and may never return.
So, it’s not so easy for BART to repurpose away from its founding concept. BART is a heavy, fixed-rail system and it goes where the tracks take it. And, right now, BART takes you to places people don’t want or need to go. And, not only does BART’s largely suburban ridership not need to go to work downtown or want to go shopping in Union Square, it doesn’t want to take transit to not go there.
BART’s own statistics do not show an explosion of crime in or near its stations and trains. But ridership is far lower now, so these numbers are, de-facto, higher. More to the point: You are likelier to see something or experience something you’d rather not see or experience when trains are largely empty than when they are largely full. And it is going to take more than a rational argument about historical levels of crime and the distinction between public misery and violent crime to convince someone who lives in Lafayette that he or she should set foot on a train; articles about lurid, singular incidents will drive more people off transit than any number of graphs or charts or statistical analyses will convince them to return.
Antisocial behavior feeds on itself. The more people stay off the trains, the more antisocial behavior there is. That’s another sort of transit Death Spiral.
BART, over the past several decades, put its money not into core capacity upgrades, but expansion — that is, extending service into (suburban) areas where people are increasingly content to work and shop from home, and decreasingly likely to hop a train. These are also places with limited capacity for transit-oriented development, which is yet another kick in the teeth.
There are no easy choices in saving money: As Radulovich notes, “the cost of running a three-car train and 10-car train is about the same.” Yes, you could cut back service, but “a BART that runs once an hour isn’t really worth having.”
So, these are big problems. Existential problems.
“The purpose of BART is no longer a park-and-ride system for suburbanites going downtown,” Radulovich sums up. Moving forward, it needs to be “walkable, bikeable neighborhoods linked together by a 24/7 transit system. A lot of people would say that’s their vision for the Bay Area.”
So, as bad as Muni’s problems may be, they could be worse. For starters, Muni is a far more nimble system; BART can alter the timing of its trains, but Muni can also alter its routes. Buses may not be sexy, but they are flexible.
Muni also has a far more diversified funding stream than BART — and, in the near term, Mayor London Breed’s proposed budget is relatively hospitable. Ridership isn’t near what it was prior to the pandemic. But it does continue to rise.
For years, Muni offered service levels that its own leadership knew it could not realistically meet. As it continues to add back service, however, it is now doing so based upon what it can actually do, rather than what it is politically expected to provide. Unlike prior years, Muni is now able to actually staff an “extra board” of reserve drivers.
If Wiener succeeds and Muni can buy some time, there is an awful lot it could do — and should do. It could reassess whether it makes sense in 2023 to run duplicative routes retracing the paths taken by competing private trolley lines in 1912. It could determine how much service aimed at funneling workers into downtown is still necessary. It could assess how to make ends meet in a world where people aren’t paying for parking garages and parking meters at the levels they did even five years ago.
It could continue to work toward better providing reliable, convenient transit service. Because if Muni isn’t reliable and convenient, what’s the point of making it free?
San Franciscans may or may not love Muni. But they’d hate to see it go.
When I arrived in the Bay Area, BART impressed me. People lined up for stops, trains stopped in a single location, they were clean. Sure wasn’t the chaos of back east. By the time I got the hell out of the Bay Area (thank goodness) BART had become a dangerous mess. I told my wife to stop taking it as I worried about her every day. Her stories of BART delays, crime, disrespectful riders kept me up at night. But the final straw was a board was more interested in protecting the criminals and homeless and couldn’t have cared less about the paying customers. The trains were dirty and unreliable. Employees were over paid and entitled, constantly threatening strikes. BART cops were more interested in spiking pensions and writing tickets for parking than in riding the trains. Bail it out? What a laugh.
BART and Muni are generally great. It is the behavior of some of their passengers and the shameless fare-dodging that make it an objectionable slog. My junior high and high-school age kids take muni and Bart to school and have been subjected to the following: a man sleeping prostrate on Bart awakens and projectile-vomits all over the floor; another, eating a bowl of cereal, has a sudden fit of rage and throws it across the car and passengers. The pedophilic cat-calls and harassment. The stories go on and on.
When the resultant experience on mass-transit is so unpleasant, ridership will plummet in a doom spiral. So Please attack the larger problems of drug addiction, mental illness, and homelessness, and put officers on the trains and buses.
The best start would be charging freeway & road tolls set to the amount it costs to keep them maintained. There are a lot of asphalt socialists out there who would fly into a road rage and run you over if you simply pointed out the truth to them.
Restore fiscal accountability to MUNI and BART:
Elect/Appoint leaders who have the guts to back down the corrupt labor unions who have bankrupted our public transit systems. These budgets have been an ATM that has been raided for decades.
Every two years, someone suggests that another tax is the solution to this problem. Vote NO. Over the last several elections, voters in Santa Clara County have passed multiple tax and fee increases including gas taxes, the Caltrain Measure RR tax, two bridge toll increases, three VTA sales taxes, Santa Clara County’s Measure A 1/8 cent sales tax, the state prop 30 ¼ cent sales tax and the 2010 Measure B Vehicle Registration Fee of $10. Additionally, we’re on the hook to pay back numerous state bond issues including high speed rail, the Proposition 1 water bond and the infrastructure bonds of 2006.
All this nickel and diming contributes into making the Bay Area a horribly expensive place to live; especially for people of modest means, who must pay the greatest percentage of their income in these regressive taxes and fees. Each increase by itself does not amount to much, but the cumulative effect is to add to the unaffordability of the region.
Before increasing taxes YET AGAIN, waste needs to be removed from transportation projects. For example, we need to eliminate the redundant and BART extension between the San Jose and Santa Clara Caltrain stations. The BART segment from these stations would duplicate both the existing Caltrain line and VTA’s 22 and 522 buses to a station that has approximately 1000 riders each weekday.
Why don’t the wealthy high rollers at MTC suggest taxing rich tech companies and leave the little guy alone for a change?
I’m against the goal to bridge the time until they can tax us more. They’ll have less ridership for 5-10 yrs min. and they should make the logical supply/demand cutbacks without yelling “Death Spiral” every time responsible adjustments are brought up(only after cutbacks on near empty train cars/bus lines would l support tax increases). I take public transportation whenever I can, but our inadequate system is simply too awkward, slow and unreliable for most hard working parents to commute to professional jobs on the peninsula (since work is leaving the city… and that’s a whole other deal).
Such a double standard to complain that BART or Muni should just drop dead when we spend billions on subsidizing roads and sprawl. Public Transit is a public good and needs to be funded as such. Like the Police & Fire Dept.
As a retired firefighter I can attest to the amazing amount of waste in those areas. Waste is always endemic when they know the cash cow (taxpayers) will bail them out one way or another. Ignore the pretty words and arguments. Follow the money.
I think the answer is as simple as collecting the fares. The last time I took the bus, which is the last time I will be taking the bus unless there is an SF miracle, no one paid but me.
I ride BART. I want it to keep going. But the people who run it clearly do not care at all. The stations are filthy, they locked off the bathrooms so people just go poop and pee in the floors and the elevators. The old trains are unsafe – they are so loud- they sound like the wheels are going to fall off. Half the people just hop the gate. The crime at the stations is crazy. BART points the finger at the City, the City points it at BART. No one does anything and the criminals get crazier all the time. They need to fire everyone and start over with people who care and policies that make sense.
It’s not just that not enough people ride BART/Muni; more board members and elected officials need to ride it. The meetings should be held at Great Highway & Geary / Judah / Taraval where board members get scolded if they show up late or plan accordingly to allow extra time. BART could alternate at Richmond, Fruitvale, or Antioch.
It would help if BART and Muni could stop duplicating work that’s done by the existing departments dedicated and experienced to deal with that issue.
BART also has a parking lot problem. Most people drive to the outer stations and ride in. Check out the north Concord parking lot sometime. Even with the current slowdown it way too small for the people who want to get off 80 and ride in. BART made a crazy decision to build the line to nowhere instead of building out to the 80/680 interchange.
This isn’t getting any better. BART/Caltrain parking in Millbrae has been significantly reduced recently. So if you were driving to Millbrae, say from Foster City, to take BART in, you’re being told tough sh*t.
So on top of all the money we’re paying for a totally inadequate transportation system, SFMTA has the gall to increase metered parking times to 10 pm? They could try issuing resident stickers to all people who live in SF that allows for discounted parking, and charge more to visitors. I’m not a driver, but still don’t think that residents should be punished for having cars, when in many cases there isn’t a viable transportation alternative.
This ^^^ I second that every SF resident should be applicable to receive a parking permit regardless of address. Punished for living on Mission Street, in a household with two part time kids and two cars necessary for the adults to work their jobs. Residential parking tickets are now $99!!!! The pandemic changed many people’s work modalities, as we ALL know….. and my healthcare job has gone hybrid making it nearly impossible to park a car 4 blocks uphill, run down to hop on some Telehealth calls for a few hours (over the 2 hour limit) and run back to my car to see a kid in person. SFMTA did nothing to accommodate these changes over the years aside from temporarily relief during SIP and the residential parking petition process remains the same for the *chance* to pay to for a sticker if you are successful with the petition… to be able to park in a neighborhood we’re already parking in that we LIVE in. And as hard as we try, we get tickets….. We are set up for failure by our city for choosing to live on certain streets with a car……some people might not even have the choice to live on said streets. Do the people of SF need to organize a march against SFMTA? YES.
SFMTA site: “Oversight of the processing, payment, review and customer service associated with the approximately 1.5 million parking and transit citations issued annually and generating approximately $90 million in revenue.”
https://www.sfmta.com/units/revenue-collection-sales#:~:text=Oversight%20of%20the%20processing%2C%20payment,approximately%20%2490%20million%20in%20revenue.
I can watch from my kitchen window as MUNI busses drive down the street – often times stacked – with four to five riders per bus. Can MUNI do more to become more efficient? Of course they can, but that would require doing less with less, and that (the latter “less”) sadly is not an option for them.
BART? The top two complaints/reasons riders don’t want to use BART; safety and delays/disruptions. BART’s answer to this is to spend capital on a anime mascots campaign to get kids to ride the system. ‘Nuff said.
The Bay Area has changed. Commute patterns of the past are no longer relevant. Yet, these two institutions want the state (taxpayers) to bail them out so they can keep blinders on and continue to act as if people are commuting as before.
Muni dug its own grave by adopting open boarding and not enforcing proof of paid fare. In my experience up to half of the riders who board buses do not pay and/or swipe transit cards. It is unfair to expect drivers to enforce payment and risk retaliation or violence by the worst of the offenders. At first Muni employed roving transit police who would request proof of fare, but that stopped. They were only authorized to issue ticket fines, and in any case I doubt there was any effective attempt to enforce payment of the fines.
Increasingly rude and violent behavior on Muni – as well as the seriously mentally ill, unwashed and homeless who are allowed to ride for “free” and often create disturbances – alienate middle class patrons. There is a reason why Uber and Lyft are so succesful here. The poor and older poor in particular have no choice, they have to use Muni and deal with the unpleasantness.
Muni is not efficient and effective in large part because the City only pays lip service to any real measure to control or limit car traffic which increases transit time, sometimes substantially. This encourages residents to drive instead of taking Muni. And all this is made worse by the fact the City in effect does not enforce traffic laws, and has not done so for decades, and they have allowed the police department to become seriously understaffed. Accidents and car/pedestrian incidents slow down Muni because they cannot
go around or choose and alternate route.
City government has consistently failed to address many of the City’s problems: Housing, rampant drug addiction, ineffective law enforcement, unacceptable rates of pedestrian injury and death,no real traffic reduction efforts, and the list goes on. And Muni? Add that to the list of major problems too.
another reader with a ‘war on the poor’ perspective willing to blame the less fortunate for their bad muni transit experience; and apparently every other woe that has beset the city.
over a million people have died from covid and will continue to threaten our civilization for years to come. war has broken out between the US and Russia. mass murders are skyrocketing and the use of deadly force by citizens and the state are literally killing our youth. it is an unfortunate consequence of these and other violent experiences that have driven the vulnerable in our society to the edge of coping. this is why we have a surge in drug use.
FYI: many poor folk have a lifeline pass which is not compatible with the clipper system; therefore one cannot tag their fare. and, as many note, the poor are the major users of muni.
Another comment that says more about its author than the person it’s responding to by equating “antisocial and disruptive” with “poor”. If I say we should keep violent, mentally ill, anti social people off our transit system and you tell me that I’m anti-poor or anti-homeless, that’s a you problem.
I don’t have a “war on the poor” perspective, nor do I blame Muni’s problems on the poor. I put the blame entirely on City government for decades of inaction and halfway measures that have caused or made life worse for all San Franciscans, including the poor. Those include inaction on affordable housing, allowing the police department to become seriously understaffed, long term underfunding of Muni, and no real action to control car traffic, making Muni less effective and turning a blind eye to the pedestrians killed or injured every year, and the number of drivers killed or injured in accidents.
The majority of San Franciscans, including the poor, are not drug addicts, homeless or criminals. We all deserve to feel safe in our homes,apartments and in public, have a Muni that is reliable and efficient, and a city government that actively supports more new and affordable housing.
I’m well aware that people of limited means are eligible for free lifetime Muni passes, but contrary to your assertion, they are issued cards compatible with the Clipper system to swipe on boarding. I know this to be a fact, because I am also a recipient of the free lifetime Muni pass program. The majority of people I see who do not pay a Muni fare or swipe a card when boarding are not the poor, but rather people who simply take advantage of the situation of no fare enforcement by Muni. If you are of limited means, apply online or at Muni offices for a free lifetime pass.
It’s exactly as you have written Joe,
Too much focus on trying to capture “new markets” and expand outward without fully flushing out the large untapped sources here in San Francisco. With the resources BART has used already, there could have been multiple lines connecting all the neighborhoods in San Francisco.
BART could learn a lot from Tokyo’s train system
While many use it to get in and out of the city, BART isn’t San Francisco’s metro, Muni is. Bart is funded by tax payers all across the Bay Area, and serves many residents besides San Franciscans. Those “new markets” had *decades of tax levies* placed on them before they ever benefited from BART, and many residents are still being levied without a BART stop via sales and property taxes.
I fully support funding public transit, but it’s important to remember that BART stands for *Bay Area* Rapid Transit.
I remember the crappy condition of our cable car system before Dianne Feinstein’s campaign to restore the system in the early 1980s. It was a great effort and now there is another $2 million slated to update that system again. I love the cable cars but are they necessary to our transit system? How much does it cost to keep it running, with employees and repairs? Maybe we need to get creative and shift those costs to the all who benefit from tourism – hotels, the airport, the convention bureau and others, or even consider mothballing those systems.
I don’t know if implementing fees is possible, but delivery services create a lot of traffic, and sadly, the city has neglected to implement any type of infrastructure for deliveries. But each delivery should have a transit tax added to help pay for public transit.
Finally, Ubers and the like should also be taxed in San Francisco.
Funding is a part of transit problem, but wrong-headed transit leadership is our main problem.
On the other hand, based on my recent experience, on the cable cars Muni brakemen actually enforce the fare requirement for all passengers, and that fare is now a flat $8.00 per passenger, with *no transfers* (e.g., Powell to California line) allowed. (!)
Maybe the cable cars, if taken alone, are actually solvent!
by the time bart reached the neighborhood i lived in, i had moved somewhere else. i still see no reason to use it because it still doesn’t take me where I need to go. and after being detained by bart police for being attacked by a street fucker at civic center station and the murder of oscar grant, i realized just how disconnected this quasi-governmental institution was to the riding public.
i personally would like to let bart die rather than fund a dead horse so privileged white suburbanites can feel they have done something to help poor folk get to work while they cruise the freeways in a ‘musk’eteer-mobile.
Great piece, Joe! It would be good to hear more about the future funding needed.
I’ve heard that a regional ballot measure is most likely in 2026, rather than 2024 (when you’d think it would be needed!), because it’s more likely to succeed in a non-Presidential election year with fewer competitive measures.
So it looks like the additional ~$5bn is in many ways a tactical bridge to a (later) ballot measure rather than being 100% about a fiscal cliff.
A little bit like Tumlin’s threatened service cuts being completely unnecessary until FY25 (the actual Muni fiscal cliff); they make for good headlines and scare riders, which might scare politicians.
Make SFMTA more reliable and faster
Speed up Muni service – Alternating stops for every other bus or train
Especially the 3rd Street rail line, split up mutiple trains, single trains every other stop
Quit paying Union Officials on top of their full time paid elected duties
Make every effort to place an operator in the same vehicle every time, increasing the quality of the ride day to day
Restore faith that you can get to your destination on time taking Muni
State of the art GPS (accurate to the size of a dime) control the entire system with Artifial Intelligence, Muni’s real intelligence is not working. Adjusting lines in real time, not by hapinstance
Nothing new, all has been proposed before, even by Muni planners
P.S. Question the cost of closing down the Kirkland Shop, the cost of einviromental cleanup is incredible, also, Kirkland helps reduce response time on morning pullout and road call’s, reduces pollution with less travel to destinations.
You make a great point about state of the art GPS and AI. Newer transit systems in the U.S. and Europe are using these real-time, state of the art tracking systems. Yes they cost more but they do so much more. Muni wants more money to do what? Continue with the same inefficiency and poor performance? Muni needs serious monitoring upgrades and a complete re-think at the highest level to eliminate or minimize or update their existing procedures and practices that don’t work and contribute to its continued inefficiency. Of course all this would require a reputable third-party transit consulting firm with a reputation for results. Such firms are more likely to be European, as many countries there are either upgrading existing systems or installing new ones. Public transit in the U.S. is largely non-existent or reliant on older, outdated technology and thinking.
City Hall’s inaction or ineffective action for decades has helped to create or make worse many major problems here, such as housing, drug addiction, homelessness, retail abandoning the city (which also lowers the city’s tax revenue base), letting the police department become seriously understaffed, etc. Muni is just one more long-standing problem City Hall has allowed to become a major problem. Their priorities are not OUR priorities.
@Lark. Transit management systems as you describe assume that Muni would already maintain a solid operation like you find elsewhere in the world. With a culture that checks and enforces against bunching, operators cutting out of service early, rampant no-shows etc.
Remember the 90 second Muni minute? The list goes on and on. Consultants or not, there are underlying problems that need to be fixed first.
Yes, and that’s why I stated directly and clearly Muni operation and management need a top level down re-think and re-organization to reduce or eliminate inefficiencies and redundancies. I was in no way suggesting the lone answer to Muni’s many problems would be big bucks state of the art GPS transit vehicle and overall system resource monitoring. Like you I realize new technology and old thinking and business as usual lethargy do not mix.
I use these systems and want them to thrive. However, I almost never see people paying for Muni, at least on the Mission busses, and it is very common now to see people jumping the BART fare gates, at least in the 24th street, 16th street, and 12th street stations that I frequent. These agencies might want to ramp up their fare enforcement efforts while they beg for public bailout money.
Muni and BART are services, they don’t lose money, they cost money. No one ever accuses the military or police of “losing money.” The way we talk about public transit and other services is all wrong. Budgets are a matter of priorities.
I certainly agree. However there is nothing wrong with expecting the funds given to Muni and BART be used efficiently and effectively to perform their services in benefit to the general public who ride them. Both Muni and BART are riddled with inefficiencies and problems of long standing, with poor management structures content to continue “business as usual” and ask for bailouts. Both need to be operated and managed AS public services, not take-it-or-leave-it enterprises.
Of the two, BART has even more structural problems built in from the very beginning. It was designed to transport workers into San Francisco and back to their homes in other parts of the Bay Area. Secondarily it was also to bring shoppers and people from outside San Francisco to shop, dine and seek entertainment here. It was never designed to function as a comprehensive and coordinated Bay Area transit system. Now all those realities have changed, and we’re left with a very big White Elephant of a problem that is incredibly expensive, doesn’t really take most people where they want to go – so they continue to drive more and more cars – and makes it both difficult and expensive to assure passenger safety and keep it reliably in operation. Of course that doesn’t mean it can’t be managed and operated better than it is, but not without a top level down reorganization first, and increased funding after that.
Agree, 100%
I agree, 100%, everyone and San Francisco residents. Businesses tourism all benefit and cannot exist without mass transportation.
You don’t pay to take an elevator in a high-rise building to a business it is built into the cost
You don’t pay to take an escalator at a department store it is built into the cost
Muni should be the same. Everyone should share it and paying for it through taxes, the value of everybody’s property and businesses, all benefit, no matter whether those individuals get on a bus or not
Imagine if Muni were re-architected to get San Franciscans where we need to go in our daily lives rather than just funneling people to and from downtown on the radial lines and phoning in (wfh?) community and neighborhood serving lines?
Transit-as-corporate-welfare, the Bechtel Model, locked us into massive sunk capital costs that are rendered practically inoperable when the corporate structure it was engineered to serve evaporates.
That corporate structure was further constrained by corporate welfare queens in SF City Hall that did their best to limit economic activity in San Francisco to their campaign contributors’ sectors: office and tourism. Resilience by economic diversity was sacrificed in favor of an economy proven fragile that was successful at politics.
Prior to 2008, the State of California did provide transit operating subsidy to local and regional operators. If memory serves, SF lost in the low nine figures each year to great recession cuts. In a certain sense, this is demanding that which was once ours is ours again. E plebnista, the Omega Glory.