Julie Kirschbaum, the acting director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, has landed the gig full-time after being appointed head of the agency today by Mayor Daniel Lurie.
Kirschbaum was in the position left behind by the agency’s former boss, Jeffrey Tumlin. He was appointed by then-Mayor London Breed in November 2019 and announced he would not return when his contract ended in December 2024.
Kirschbaum must tackle a series of challenges, such as the projected $240 million department deficit starting 2026, a citywide network of biking lanes that have become targets following the controversial Valencia center lane and the questionable traffic safety plan Vision Zero, which has failed to reduce traffic deaths in the city.
David Pilpel, a longtime transportation watchdog and former member of the transit agency’s citizens advisory committee, said the “No. 1” issue for Kirschbaum to tackle is the budget deficit and the stability of Muni services.
“That is not a small task,” Pilpel said.
Gerald Cauthen, a transit engineer and former Muni engineer, agreed. “Keeping the Muni rail operations running effectively,” Cauthen said, should be a priority. “It is the heart and soul of the agency, and is extremely important.”
Cauthen, for his part, said he has confidence in Kirschbaum’s willingness to work with residents and get to know their needs. As one of the co-founders of Safe Muni, a transit advocacy group in San Francisco, Cauthen said Kirschbaum would go “out to neighborhood groups and have a fair amount of interaction with people. She is conscientious and knowledgeable about the organization. She tries very hard at what she does.”
Cauthen cautioned, however, that a hands-on approach doesn’t always lead to productive results. Cauthen cited the example of Vision Zero, an expensive yet controversial pedestrian safety plan that has cost millions of dollars.
Lurie, for his part, was effusive in his praise. “Under her leadership, Muni has reached new heights for speed, reliability, cleanliness and safety,” the mayor said in a press release.
Sarah Jones, the former planning director at the SFMTA and now the community development director for Marin County, also spoke highly of Kirchbaum. “You could have a really good, substantial discussion and work through issues with her,” Jones said.
Kirchbaum is aware of the challenges ahead of her. “I’m going to make sure we maintain the incredible improvements we’ve made to the Muni system, despite the SFMTA’s daunting financial challenges,” Kirchbaum said in a press release.
“Fighting for transportation funding is going to be one of my top priorities,” Kirchbaum continued. “But an equally important priority is going to be rebuilding trust where trust has been lost between our agency and some of the communities and businesses we serve.”
Before Kirchbaum became the acting director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, she was the agency’s director of transit for six years from 2018 to 2024, leading Muni through the Covid-19 pandemic and rebuilding ridership. Weekday ridership has bounced back to 74 percent of 2019 levels, and weekend ridership has reached 92 percent of pre-pandemic levels, according to an agency report in October 2024.
“So the question is,” Cauthen said, “What is she gonna do now?”
Time and time again Julie Kirchbaum has shown she is a hands on, brass tacks, engaged and creative thinker. She started as an urban transit planner and worked her way up. Good riddance to overpaid ideologue Jeff Tumlin (who had zero urban transit experience and worked as a consultant before Breed gave him the keys to the city). Tumlin left a dumpster fire for San Francisco. While we are deeply thankful Kirschbaum has taken the job, we do not envy her one bit.
I want to give Julie Kirchbaum a chance and any help I can. At minimum, I will continue to pay my fare, be polite to transit operators, and not vandalize public property. I wish I could do more but I no longer have the energy. I trust David Pilpel and Gerry Cauthen who have been in the trenches donating their time and knowledge for longer than anyone I know. No one wants to lose transit service but this situation is far from being solely SFMTA’s fault–the city’s budget over the past decade shows where substantial revenues went.
SFMTA has a solid hand in their own budgets being this bad, thanks though?
Sarah Jones is great! If Sarah’s optimistic about Kirschbaum as director, then so am I. Kirschbaum also must have been doing a pretty good job managing the transit division, since Muni rider surveys are showing the highest satisfaction so far this century.
I do think Kirschbaum is wrong to favor inefficient battery electric buses over trolleybuses, however, and will be pushing her on that. With in-motion charging, trolleybuses can already run off-wire when they need to (with a much smaller battery), so it’s win-win. Battery electrics have lower capacity to hold passengers, break down more frequently, and are less efficient than drawing power from the overhead wires we already have. Same reason you plug in your laptop instead of burning through battery when you’re at home/near an outlet.
I think it was a federal thing to like electric buses. With this administration, who knows what’s going to happen.
It’s a complete waste. It’s the opposite of good governance to early adopt expensive and unproven pet projects for political optics. It does literally NOTHING for the overall environment.
Sure great great, start with a quarter billion dollar self-imposed deficit and work backwards to success I guess? Same MTA as the old MTA.
It doesn’t matter. It will be the same results. Throw more money at a decrepit system that refuses to change.
The two main reasons Muni is operating well, compared to the past:
1. Only half the work (i.e. ridership) during rush hour. Muni still couldn’t handle pre-pandemic ridership levels properly
2. Props to SFMTA for sustaining the generational drive replacing hundreds of old buses and the ramshackle Breda light rail cars.
Because MTA was run so efficiently, of course she’s earned the job?
Sarc tag?
Muni has earned an all-time high satisfaction rating recently and for literally the first time in my 25 years of living here, the mayoral candidates weren’t ’promising to fix Muni’ as part of their platforms. As for the rest of MTA, it runs as ‘efficiently’ as it can given snowflake drivers scream bloody murder every time Tumlin wanted to make them pay their fair share for using up curb space while hemorrhaging money on empty garages. So that I will concede as ‘inefficient’ – Tumlin didn’t stick it to drivers nearly enough. But something tells me your uninformed comment didn’t come from that place.
I don’t buy their cooked survey numbers, I believe the deficits though. You can’t build a 2.5 BILLION DOLLAR subway station for 20k daily riders with borrowed money for a pet constituency, watch it fall into disrepair and forever-costs, saddle an entire transit org with that while paying huge salaries to largely worthless middle-managers, and then just expect to hand-wave and say “oh, but we’re satisfied with this, as we go completely out of business.” It’s ludicrous. MUNI and SFMTA need to be wiped out and started over with, starting from actual needs and planning for actual needs. They’re both politically captured by the political goldbricking “non-profit” class of .gov parasitism.
>> “MUNI and SFMTA need to be wiped out and started over with”
Ah, OK. No need to take you seriously. Thank you.
Tito nobody takes your snarky nothings seriously, because there’s nothing serious behind it. You have nothing to say.