The San Fran Muni is dying. Instead of planning for the end, it is pretending that a few fixes will gt it riders. Of course the real fix would be to stop the homeless from sleeping on the Muni, the numerous dally crimes end and the vehicle is clean and disease free. Even that will not help.
Why? Because San Fran has collapsed. Workers refuse to go back to the office, hence no need for the Muni. Plus, major hotels are closing, commercial buildings are vacant, with no buyers in sight.
“But the cost-neutral enhancements rolled out by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency last month could signal how the agency will focus its service on heavily used routes as its precarious financial position approaches collapse.
In essence, the transit-poor — and literal poor — will get poorer.
Without a torrent of funding from the state or federal government, the agency is set to face a $130 million budget deficit by 2024. Other Bay Area transit agencies, as well as those across the state, are in a similar position.
It is already bankrupt. Stop pretending and act like adults.
Muni: Head for the hills — while you still can
By Adam Shanks, SF Examiner, 6/2/23 https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/transit/sf-muni-faces-tough-bus-route-choices-as-fiscal-cliff-looms/article_6738716a-fd65-11ed-8169-c71e520996e3.html
It sounded like the kind of announcement made by a thriving transit agency: Service on the 1 California, 28 19th Avenue, 38R Geary Rapid and other congested lines is increasing this summer.
But the cost-neutral enhancements rolled out by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency last month could signal how the agency will focus its service on heavily used routes as its precarious financial position approaches collapse.
In essence, the transit-poor — and literal poor — will get poorer.
Without a torrent of funding from the state or federal government, the agency is set to face a $130 million budget deficit by 2024. Other Bay Area transit agencies, as well as those across the state, are in a similar position.
Last week, SFMTA Director Jeffrey Tumlin warned that absent a windfall, it would likely begin to cut services in regions of The City that already suffer from the least access to public transit, such as its hilly neighborhoods.
Instead, it would focus its efforts on its “core service,” or its most frequently used lines.
Someone who lives near the 38 Geary bus line in the Richmond district might get by, but that’s foreboding news for those who rely on routes less-traveled to get to work, the grocery store or doctor’s appointments.
Inherently, transit cuts will most impact the least well-off. The agency says that 57% of Muni riders are people of color and 70% of riders make less than $50,000 a year.
“Before the SFMTA makes any Muni cuts, we will work with community members to understand the most pressing needs, analyze new travel patterns and prioritize neighborhoods with residents who depend on transit most,” Tumlin said. “But there is no good way to make cuts of this magnitude. In the end, cuts to transit will hurt all San Franciscans and our prospects for a strong economic recovery.”
One need not have a long memory to remember a time when service cuts ran this deep.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the agency drastically scaled back service, slashing the number of routes by 40% and ending service at 10 p.m. while “the hilly neighborhoods of San Francisco were barely served,” Tumlin said.
If Muni falls off the fiscal cliff, service reductions would not necessarily match those made during the pandemic. In the last few years, ridership patterns have changed — routes serving downtown continue to lag behind pre-pandemic levels, but those connecting schools have fared much better — which would influence how Muni chooses where to make cuts.
As it did during the pandemic, Muni would also make cuts with its “equity strategy” in mind, prioritizing neighborhoods that have high percentages of seniors, people of color, and households of low incomes.
Vinita Goyal, executive director of nonprofit advocacy group San Francisco Transit Riders, lauded Muni for making cuts through an equity lens during the pandemic, but noted “equity” neighborhoods were already underserved by public transit.
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The group’s outreach to residents of Bayview Hunters Point found that many people commute by car because they feel they can’t rely on public transit. The group found a pervasive feeling that the T Third Street light rail does not serve the neighborhood well.
“Folks are still reliant on bus and on-street connections,” Goyal said. “What Bayview needs are more transit lines overall, more transit connections.”
But those improvements can’t be made if Muni is in a financial crisis. And without better service, people are going to be less inclined to support measures that would fund transit.
“There’s such alienation and distrust with transit riders, that in any of the measures or future funding mechanisms that need to go on the ballot, they lose out because the community doesn’t trust the agency,” Goyal said.
In the Bay Area, two-thirds of working poor people commuted by car before the pandemic because public transit was underperforming, according to Adina Levin, advocacy director for Seamless Bay Area, an organization that advocates for the region’s transit systems to be better integrated and rider friendly.
With housing costs skyrocketing, she said, “There’s been a lot of suburbanization of poverty, a lot of people being displaced to places that are further away and have less good public transportation.”
A public transportation implosion would push even more people to buy cars, stunting California’s efforts to mitigate climate change and clogging area streets with more traffic.
“The inability of our bridges and streets to carry the people without this transit, it’s really not imaginable,” Levin said.
Federal aid that kept transit agencies from collapsing during the COVID-19 pandemic is now nearly depleted for most Bay Area transit agencies. Meanwhile, many of their riders are working from home or commuting by other means. Car traffic on the Bay Bridge has recovered to pre-pandemic levels in a way transit ridership has not.
Transit officials and state officials had hoped that Gov. Gavin Newsom would provide a fiscal bridge between the federal pandemic relief and the uncertain future, but the budget he unveiled this year did no such thing.
A proposal currently working its way through the state legislature would restore the approximately $2 billion in cuts to transit capital funding — for projects such as rail repairs and new trains — but does not provide any additional operational funding, which pays for things like operators to drive those trains.
The legislators’ proposal would allow transit agencies to “flex” some of that capital funding into operational funding, but transit officials and advocates warn that the proposal remains insufficient to pull agencies back from the fiscal cliff.
“If the Governor & Legislature allow public transportation to crater by failing to throw our transit systems a lifeline, California’s housing policy will be upended,” Sen. Scott Wiener, who represents San Francisco, wrote Tuesday on Twitter. “Transit is absolutely essential to a sustainable & successful housing policy.”
