The Path Ahead for Muni – Streetsblog San Francisco
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The controversial debate over the future of Muni has reached its climax and culminated in a special hearing on the restoration of Muni service last Friday. Supervisors Preston and Chan wanted to know why full service hours could not be restored immediately prior to the pandemic, implying that a secret decision had already been made to abandon large numbers of Muni lines. For his part, Director Tumlin merely reiterated his assertion that neither the money nor the staff would be available to restore service faster than the agency had planned.
It is understandable that Director Tumlin would be cautious about restoring service times too quickly. SFMTA’s financial health was in dire straits even before the pandemic and is now at a crisis point, with a slow downtown recovery continuing to lead to financial uncertainty and the need to reinstate a workforce decimated by the pandemic. However, it is also unacceptable for drivers to have to wait until the end of 2022 for Muni to return to its pre-pandemic service levels.
Fortunately, there is a strategy to improve service beyond the zero-sum game of deciding where to allocate a limited number of service hours without waiting for SFMTA to be fully staffed and funded. A strategy on which neither Director Tumlin nor his superiors focused enough.
Although the number of service hours (i.e. the time our bus operators spend behind the wheel) may be limited, we can achieve more service miles (i.e. the distance our buses travel) by only using transit lanes and other priority transit methods to keep bus traffic in speeding up the whole city. In addition to shortening travel times, a faster bus journey also enables more bus journeys every day with the same number of operating hours.
At the start of the pandemic, a large number of temporary emergency lanes were planned for key transit corridors across the city, but implementation has stalled as the network is far from complete. Planned transit lanes on Divisadero with a possible 30% travel time savings have been removed because the curb lanes are too narrow – and yet somehow wide enough for the 24 Divisadero to continue to use – and transit lanes on Freemasons with potential 25% travel time savings have been opened postponed indefinitely. Both projects have instead been replaced by an undemanding program of left-turn restrictions.
Proposed transit lanes on Fulton, Lincoln, Mission, Ocean / Geneva and Potrero / Bayshore also languish in the planning of purgatory. Other treatments for transit priorities, such as temporary bus failures and queue crossings, have been implemented very sparingly and should be rolled out across the city. There is no reason why a frequent muni-service street should not have the most aggressive initial treatments for transit.
Such improvements would also complement SFMTA’s proposal to prioritize service on higher-frequency lines rather than lower-frequency parallel lines, one of the options being considered as part of a study to redesign the Muni network for a world after Pandemic should be considered. The higher frequency Muni lines either already have solid transit initial treatments or have the frequency that justifies their implementation. By moving service hours to these roads, we can provide many more service miles than if they were used on lower frequency lines that do not have robust measures to prioritize transit and cannot support them.
Priority treatments in transit are essentially free from a financial perspective, but can be a political challenge due to the need to remove parking lots or general lanes to make room for transit. An unwritten rule in San Francisco politics is the prerogative of superiors; If the supervisor doesn’t support a project for a particular district, it likely won’t happen, even if that project officially falls under the purview of a citywide agency like SFMTA.
So while Director Tumlin should be criticized for not pushing the initial transit treatments as far as possible, managers are also responsible for not advocating car-free transportation in their districts. Divisadero falls into Supervisor Preston’s district, and Freemasons span Preston’s district and Chan’s district. In particular, both overseers remained silent about the failure of the SFMTA to implement the proposed transit lanes in these corridors; they should get in touch.
We’ve heard enough excuses from Headmaster Tumlin that there is nothing he can do to improve transit traffic without increased income, and enough tipping from superiors Preston and Chan while they don’t advocate the first thoroughfares in their own districts. Transit routes and priority actions will accomplish much of the service improvements Preston and Chan call for, while fulfilling Tumlin’s desire for tax responsibility. Instead of continuing a meaningless cycle of conflict, our supervisors and administrators must work together to redesign our streets for the benefit of our Muni system.
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Jon Bate is a Muni driver and Streets for People advocacy activist.
