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May 22, 2023

Muni, BART facing a crisis. State bailout is just the beginning.

Leer en español Back in the 1970s, Muni general manager Curtis Green hit upon

Leer en español

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.

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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.

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Managing Editor/Columnist. Joe was born in San Francisco, raised in the Bay Area, and attended U.C. Berkeley. He never left.

"Your humble narrator" was a writer and columnist for SF Weekly from 2007 to 2015, and a senior editor at San Francisco Magazine from 2015 to 2017. You may also have read his work in the Guardian (U.S. and U.K.); San Francisco Public Press; San Francisco Chronicle; San Francisco Examiner; Dallas Morning News; and elsewhere.

He resides in the Excelsior with his wife and three (!) kids, 4.3 miles from his birthplace and 5,474 from hers.

The Northern California branch of the Society of Professional Journalists named Eskenazi the 2019 Journalist of the Year.