San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
All aboard Muni to halt the carmageddon in S.F.
Times are a-changin’ on San Francisco’s streets. Slow Streets, the city program created early in the pandemic to give residents space to recreate outside while social distancing by deterring car traffic on selected neighborhood streets, has been made permanent. On Dec. 6, the city’s Municipal Transportation Agency board voted to keep 15 of the 31 originally installed Slow Streets and added another.
This follows last month’s decision by voters to reject Proposition I and pass Prop. J, essentially making the John F. Kennedy Drive Promenade car-free permanently. And the incoming supervisor for the Sunset, Joel Engardio, just joined his predecessor in endorsing a car-free future for the Great Highway.
For supporters of walking and biking as alternatives to the car, it seems like the wins keep coming.
But not all the change has been positive. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s latest survey shows that while these street changes have brought a welcome increase in bicycling, car trips have also increased while public transit trips have fallen. Despite the efforts of activists, San Francisco’s trajectory is toward a more car-dependent, traffic-choked city.
So what’s the missing piece to turn our city’s transportation future around? Investing in Muni. The passage of Prop. L, which keeps SFMTA’s capital projects on track, is a start. But we need to go further.
Muni is still operating at about 82% of pre-pandemic service, a figure that lags peer cities. North-south transit on the west side has especially suffered. In February 2020, Muni served 19th Avenue with 12 buses per hour on weekdays. Now, it runs four to five buses per hour. You don’t need a planning degree to see that such dramatic cuts put more cars on the road, making it no surprise a recent study reported increased air pollution on 19th Avenue.
Another factor is that, as in many U.S. cities, San Francisco’s transit system focuses on commutes to downtown. The assumption is that most people who can afford cars will drive everywhere else. That was already a suspect assumption given our climate goals, but the rise of remote work makes it even more
important to rethink how public transit can meet our needs. Transit must evolve into a practical option for social trips, shopping, getting kids to school and commuting to working-class jobs not centered in the Financial District.
Muni has taken steps in that direction, shifting capacity to lines like the 29 Sunset and 8 Bayshore, which serve crosstown trips and outlying neighborhoods. As the example of 19th Avenue shows, however, more is needed. Ideally, increased service would go hand-in-hand with street changes. Page Slow Street, for example, could come with a bump in service on the parallel 21 Hayes, as Supervisor Dean Preston has requested.
Even with increased service, to make someone a regular bus rider, you first need to get them to try the bus. For those new to Muni, the system can be daunting. One barrier is fare payment. Filling up a Clipper card downtown is fine for someone who commutes there every day, but what if you mostly ride around the west side, which has few locations to purchase or fill a Clipper card? True, there are mobile options, but those only work if you’re tech-savvy enough to use them.
A fare-free pilot program would encourage people to try Muni and pick up the transit-riding habit. It worked in Colorado, where transit agencies recently had lasting ridership gains after a month of free fares. Los Angeles, Kansas City, Washington, D.C., and New York City have also piloted or are considering
fare-free transit. San Francisco could try free transit citywide or on certain lines, such as the 18, 19, 44, 56 and similar “community” routes that serve outlying areas.
Free transit is hardly a radical idea, considering parking in much of San Francisco is free. Even in busy commercial areas, meters are shut off in the evenings and on Sundays (but fare boxes are not). Given Muni fares accounted for 12.7% of the Municipal Transportation Agency’s 2019-2020 revenue — and that percentage has likely dropped since the start of the pandemic — a new and dedicated funding source could replace it. An assured funding source would also make Muni more resilient, as BART is discovering. BART depends much more on fares, and therefore faces a much steeper budget shortfall than Muni does in the years ahead.
On a free Muni, fare inspectors could be retrained as community ambassadors, which along with increased ridership, would help mitigate the safety concerns of riders, especially at night.
Propositions J and L have put a greener, lower-traffic San Francisco within our reach. To get there, we need to complement our wonderful bike lanes and Slow Streets with a renewed commitment to public transit. It’s time to invest in a Muni that welcomes all and is a dependable, easy choice for any trip in the city.