Don't Rip Up Your Muni Passes Just Yet
OMG did you hear? Gavin says Muni's totally going to be free from now on! Also, if you ask nicely, the drivers will let you steer for a few blocks; and they're going to remove the floors so that the passengers can run the buses with their feet like the Flintstones!
But wait. The Examiner, a local advertising flier, quotes Gavin thusly: "It's so much more complex than that." Oh. And when we spoke to Muni to get their side, they just directed us to Gavin's statements and didn't have anything else to add. Oh. Well then, what's the story, morning glory?
The story so far is this: Gavin noticed that they're spending a lot of money on fare collection, and only bringing in a measly $138,000,000 a year. So why bother collecting fares, he mused aloud. And then the city responded by flipping out: some folks love the idea (yay, free!) and some folks hate it (that $1.50 fee prevents buses from turning into rolling homeless shelters).
And Muni, with its reputation for being one of SF's most secretive organizations, doesn't even want to talk about it: there's a study underway, y'see, and an ongoing conversation, and people are investigating and we'll all know more about the issue ... eventually. Which maybe means never.
After the jump: our analysis, including speculation and guesswork.
First, a prediction: Muni will never, ever, in a billion years, not even once, not even slightly, ever be free. (Except on Spare the Air days! Those are cool. And maybe New Year's.) We spoke to a number of folks connected to transit, both in the Bay Area and elsewhere, and none of the experts have much enthusiasm for the idea, based in part on some limited data and bumpy experiments elsewhere. At best, we think it'll only ever be compared unfavorably to other solutions, presented as a dreamy pie-in-the-sky long shot.
The idea has a couple things going against it: first, there's that "homeless shelter on wheels" thing. And in a larger sense, free bus rides will probably mean that buses will be more crowded ... which means we'll need to run more ... which means we'll be paying more drivers, and mechanics, and custodians. Customers do tend to stampede towards anything that's free.
Muni's reluctance to release any statement about the idea is a mark against it, too. "It's my job to point out what's good about what the agency does," Muni Spokeswoman Maggie Lynch says in this week's SFBG. It's possible that Muni's silence could be a case of "if you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all."
Another bad sign: this thing came totally out of left field. Gavin's the first person to float the idea -- at least, the first one who's actually been in a position to make it happen. Muni's never really mentioned the free fares; neither have MTA and SFCTA and SPUR and RescueMuni and the Supes and the Controller and SFCityScape and the union. We have a feeling that Newsom's on his own with this one.
Speaking of the union, we wonder how they're taking this news. Hm ... well, seeing as how it would put fare-enforcement officers out of a job, and would mean more work for everyone else without really improving conditions for them, we'd have to guess that they're not really pleased about it. Especially since they're going to be renegotiating their contract soon; they'll want to maneuver into some clever bargaining position, and it's hard to see how free fares will help them.
And don't forget, Muni's in the middle of a Transit Effectiveness Project right now. By December, they'll have collected a ton of data about how they need to improve. We wouldn't be surprised to see some study of freeness in the TEP, and we also wouldn't be surprised to see it compared unfavorably to other methods for bumping up Muni's revenue. When placed side-by-side with sexy ideas like SFgo, the folks in charge of spending city money probably won't be able to resist plugging cash into new initiatives and employees, rather than reducing expenditures.
And where's Stuart "Fare Hike" Sunshine in all of this? He's simply missing. Nobody wants to talk about his involvement, which is funny since Muni's paying him $84,000 a year to, um, do something. Are we getting our money's worth here? Again, Muni won't say; and while that isn't a bad sign, it also isn't a good one. (In Stuart's defense, we've heard that he's a very pleasant person.)
Ultimately, it comes down to this: free fares would be a risk for Muni; it would reduce Muni's expenditures; it would mean Muni employees' jobs would get harder; and it would require that Muni be prepared to report some bad news if the program doesn't work out. Any of those things by themselves would be a strike against the idea; but together, they're enough for Muni to kill it dead.