S.F.’s ‘Transit Boy’ reporting for duty
Chris Arvin looks to keep SFMTA in check, accountable
After some throat clearing during a July meeting of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency Board of Directors, Jeffrey Tumlin, the city’s transportation director, tried to explain why the agency was aiming for 85% of prepandemic service for the foreseeable future.
The SFMTA, which is lagging behind hundreds of other jurisdictions in restoring service, could move too slowly, he said, and create a “classic transit death spiral.” A sad face emoticon flashed on the screen. He then described “a different kind of transit death spiral” if the agency were to move too quickly, run out of money and have to make sudden cuts. This time a happy face appeared only to be replaced by one with a frown. The goal, Tumlin said, was to “find the Goldilocks space.”
The presentation on the August returntoservice plans continued for another 30 minutes. Finally, the board called for public comment, and a familiar voice announced itself.
“Hello. This is Chris Arvin.” Arvin, one of the city’s most visible transportation advocates, had already previewed Tumlin’s presentation for his more than 8,000 Twitter followers: “today: the SFMTA will be making the case for transit austerity at their board meeting, using sad face emojis to explain why they intend to remain at 85% of our former service through at least june 2023.”
As he spoke for his allotted two minutes, Arvin was, as always, polite but to the point. “We could do a lot with 90% of prepandemic service, but we don’t even know what that looks like. We haven’t seen what the budget looks like at 90%, 95%, 100% of service. We just get the information for a decision that’s already been made and just kind of have to, I guess, be OK with it.”
Later, on Twitter, at least one person would thank Arvin for his comments, for pushing back on Tumlin’s framing, pushing past his frowning emoticons and asking hard questions. This wasn’t Arvin’s first time.
Arvin, who has been dubbed, variously, “Transit Boy” and San Francisco’s “top transpo nerd,” has made it a point for the past year to ensure the SFMTA doesn’t get any passes as it rebounds from its historic, pandemicera service cuts.
He’s done deep dives into ridership data (collected through public records requests) to find the lines that serve the most marginalized and push to get them restored; he’s advocated for increased latenight service; he’s programmed a Twitter bot to announce when the department publishes documents; and, along with his girlfriend, Kat Siegal, he’s created a website that compares the SFMTA’s restoration progress to more than 400 other transportation jurisdictions nationwide. (Currently the agency ranks at 364 out of 434.)
All of this, he says, is to make sure that San Franciscans know what’s going on. He doesn’t want the SFMTA to use this crisis as an opportunity to drastically redesign the system without proper citizen involvement.
“Even for me, as someone who is very engaged and follows all the board meetings, I still often feel like I don’t have the full picture of what’s going on,” he said recently. “And so that means the general public, the people who don’t have time to look at this stuff because they’re actually trying to wait for the bus to go to work … (don’t) know what’s happening.”
Transit Boy to the rescue.
If “Transit Boy” has an origin story, it takes place a decade ago, not long after Arvin, now 31, moved to San Francisco from New Hampshire. Growing up, Arvin had, of course, visited bigger cities, like Boston, but it wasn’t until he made a home in the Bay Area that he began to really use public transportation. In New Hampshire he had mostly relied on cars.
It took Arvin a year (or thereabouts) to sort out San Francisco’s tangled bus and metro routes, to realize that sometimes bus stops are just marked by “yellow paint on a light pole.” But once he had it figured out, he felt like he’d achieved mastery over something special.
Some people, he says, think cars are freedom. “But I think (being able to) hop on a bus and go anywhere is a different, better kind of freedom.”
Then, one day, at a book fair in the Inner Sunset, Arvin came across a giant green book with the title “Inside Muni” and got lost in photographs of streetcars all over the city — in places he didn’t know they had once existed. He bought the book, went home and did more research. What he really wanted was to find a map, something that showed how San Francisco’s streetcar system had changed over the years. When he couldn’t find one, he designed his own interactive map, filled it with historical photographs and tweeted it out.
From there, things unfolded naturally, which is how Arvin prefers it.
“I’m bad at planning things,” he says. “I kind of just go along with the flow and just do what interests me and see what happens. And that has varying degrees of success.”
The response to the interactive map led to a spot on the board of the Market Street Railway, a nonprofit that works to preserve San Francisco’s historic transit, to an online shop where he sells transitthemed gear and to being a recognized voice in discussions around transit. Now, years later, he’s leveraging all of that to help advocate for a return to 100% of prepandemic Muni service.
“I want to use my time ... to make sure that people are paying attention to what’s happening,” Arvin says. “And that the agency is putting riders first.”
Here’s how much, by the way, Arvin loves transit: He remembers talking about public transportation on his first date with his girlfriend. On “Animal Crossing,” a popular
video game where players design their own island, Arvin made sure to add functional Muni Metro stops. And he can name, without hesitation, his favorite bus line — the 33; he likes the “amazing views of the city you get from the bus at the turn near Clayton and Market.”
“Chris is a real transit nerd in the most loving sense of the word,” says Zack DeutschGross, one of the organizers of the San Francisco Transit Riders advocacy group. “He brings so much joy to transit,” a field mostly “dominated by planners with rulers and folks with hard hats.”
Supervisor Dean Preston, who earlier this year appointed Arvin to the SFMTA’s Citizens’ Advisory Council, describes him as “relentlessly positive.” But it’s not just that.
Arvin, who currently works as a freelance designer, is just as comfortable with graphic design as he is with coding and statistical analysis, all of which he combines to considerable effect.
“I would be hard pressed to think of others in this city who have the level of knowledge and expertise he has,” Preston says.
This time last year, long before much of the media was talking about restoring service, Arvin tweeted out a de
tailed analysis of the more than 20 bus and streetcar lines that had been suspended. The cuts, he found, were disproportionately affecting older, poorer, disabled and nonwhite San Franciscans. All of this was on his own time. All of this was for the public’s benefit.
That work caught Lateefah Simon’s attention, just as she was mounting an unexpected campaign to keep her seat on the BART Board of Directors. At the time, her reelection was hardly a sure thing and she needed some help. Fast.
“I kept looking at his stuff, looking at his data,” she says. Finally, “I just inboxed him. And I was like, I think you’re amazing.” Arvin had just left his job at a tech company and had been planning to take time off, but when he saw Simon’s note, “I was like ‘Hell, yah.’ ”
On the second day, he came to Simon with a question: Can I just make a few corrections on your Twitter account and your bio ... there are some spelling errors. “That’s the moment when it was like take everything,” Simon says. Her Twitter account password, her email password. “You can have my front door key,” she told him.
In the end, Simon won reelection, and now, she says, if
she ever runs for office again, whatever the position, she’s bringing Arvin with. “I felt like when he was working with me. I felt like he cared about me.” Let’s get off the phone — she remembers him telling her (Simon is a single mother) — go get dinner with your kid.
In May, Arvin’s outlook on SFMTA’s restoration was grim — not defeatist, but grim.
“I think we’re going into an era of austerity, where the service we provide is not based on how much we need,” but what the budget says, he said. “That, to me, is a failure of transit leadership and also a failure of city leadership.”
Recently, though, Arvin and other activists have had some major wins. The SFMTA has agreed to partially restore the 31Balboa and the MOcean View light rail, two lines advocates say are crucial for underserved communities. It has also committed to increasing latenight service, something Arvin had been pushing for weeks.
“Important to recognize progress,” Arvin tweeted. “When the August Muni changes were first announced there was no new latenight service, no 31 line, no M trains. that happened because people spoke up.”
A few days later, following Tumlin’s July deathspiral presentation, Arvin struck a slightly more upbeat note — polite but to the point — in an email:
“I feel way less anxious and less concerned about the transit we’ll have in August now than I did a few months ago,” he wrote. “To be real, though, I don’t think anyone who wants to ride transit should ever have to organize or protest in order to ride.”
So, Transit Boy will be watching.