How Much Clearer Does Muni Need It Spelled Out?

The report's title: "The Downward Spiral." Costs are rising much faster than revenues, and it's going to get worse, unless we can increase ridership by 36%, to 1,000,000 riders per day, by 2015.

The solution is to make Muni 25% faster. That'll increase ridership (as evidenced by Caltrains' successful Baby Bullet trains) without much increasing costs, since Muni's biggest expense -- labor, which comprises 75% of the budget -- won't have to change. Less waiting and shorter ride times will make more people ride.

Muni should be the obvious way to travel in SF -- Fast, Frequent, Reliable, and Easy To Use. (None of which, SFist hastens to point out, it currently is. Slow travel; long waits; unpredictable service; confusing routes -- it's amazing anyone rides Muni at all. When the SPUR report says, "People like fast transit service!" we can imagine Muni officials reading it and furrowing their brows, saying, "what an intriguing proposition." The overage peak-time speed of the 38 Geary is currently 5.3 mph -- FIVE POINT F**KING THREE MILES PER F**KING HOUR.) The Mayor, Board of Supes, and MTA Board should increase average speed on major corridors by 25% by 2009, and then give Muni the resources to get the job done.

Muni's got a lot of costs, for a lot of reasons -- for example, it was formed by consolidating private companies (which has resulted in redundancies like the 2-Clement running one block over from the 38-Geary), it operates in mixed traffic (SF's streets are optimized for cars, not transit), and has made generous concessions to unions (the City Charter prevents collective bargaining).

Here's how to fix things.

• Change traffic signal timing to favor transit.
• Install traffic signal technology to extend green lights as transit approaches.
• Reduce boarding times with prepaid fare vending, more proof-of-payment, and low-floor vehicles.
• Change parking policies to decrease double parking; strictly enforce parking regulations on primary corridors.
• Add bus bulbs to sidewalks, so buses do not have to pull in and out of stops.
• Provide real-time next bus arrival times -- this improvement alone has been shown to increase ridership significantly.
• Make Muni easy to understand with better signage, clearer maps, and more available information.
• Make it easier to buy Muni products like passes, tokens, and maps.
• Clean the buses better.
• Connect more seamlessly to other transit systems; be more bike-friendly; provide better pedestrian access to stops.
• Respace and relocate transit stops.
• Explore benefits of implementing short lines, such as the Castro Shuttle.
• Increase limited and express service.
• Monitor transit performance so it does not erode.
• Provide transit-only lanes, and increase effectiveness with distinctive colors, physical barriers, textured surface, raised pavement markers, contraflow operation, and/or lane dividers.
• Increase MTA planning staff -- BART carries fewer people, but has 12 planners to Muni's 4.
• Exercise contractual rights to cut costs -- reducing overtime, for example, is not only permissiable but would save $6 million per year.
• Unions and management must work together to improve service and reduce costs; for example, use GPS tech to improve supervisory ability and improve productivity. The alternative -- job cuts -- are in nobody's interests.
• Remove Muni driver wages from the City Charter, so unions and management can set more productive terms.
• On core routes with frequent service and traffic signal priority, use headway-based instead of schedule-based operation. This means that drivers do not attempt to slow down in order to stay on schedule -- instead, spacing between buses is maintained by releasing buses from the terminus at precise intervals and, when necessary, allowing buses to pass one another. Without headway-based operation, the potential benefit of other improvements will be watered down.
• (To SFist's suprise, the report makes no mention of improvements to Muni's abyssmal website, which is bloated, inaccurate -- it still lists Michael Burns as Executive Director! -- and difficult to navigate.)

SPUR's plan for making it happen:

• Muni needs to draw up a self-improvement plan, starting in October 2005.


• Secure staff and funding for its plan in December 2005.


• Test the plan out from January 2006 to October 2006.


• Make immediate improvements from January 2006 to October 2006.


• Complete environmental review between November 2006 and July 2007.


• Implement plan from July 2007 to December 2008.

It sounds like a tough plan to follow, but LA did something similar and increased ridership by 40 percent.

A chief obstacle will be politics -- people in SF love to argue. We have to be willing to accept some concessions -- like slightly longer walks, or less street parking -- for larger benefits.