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Ask a Muni Driver
In today's installment, our new Muni Driver gives us his views on how to improve Muni. We'll get things started right away but first, a reminder. If you got any questions you'd like asked, send them to editor@sfist.com.
And second, our driver would like to state this disclaimer before we go ahead.
I am not an official spokesperson for anything except my opinion as a MUNI driver, San Franciscan, and daily passenger just like the rest of you sorry sods relying on MUNI to get us to work on time. If you figure out who I am, please, please don't tell my bosses 'cause I want that pension some happy day – assuming there's any money left in the fund for the lowly drivers by that time.
And onto the question, "what else would you do to fix Muni?"
If I throw out everything I have to say here, this post will be too long for anyone to read. The last driver who wrote for this column stated a lot of the problems. They’re not mysterious; you, me, MTA, as Leonard Cohen would say: “everybody knows”. So I’m just gonna focus on a few ideas I think might actually do some good.
1) More buses!!!! Beef up service capacity! DOH
2) More express buses! This is a huge failure in our fair city. Most large cities, and even some medium-sized ones, have learned the obvious lessons of commute times and basic population distribution of their ridership . Express buses can take the load off the trains, and they can do what we all want: get us to work and back with dispatch.
3) Final idea this week - start screaming now, but please don't stop reading until the end. I think MUNI should raise the single-ride fare to $2.00. Stop screaming, there's more! At the same time, MUNI should drop the price of Fastpasses from $45.00 to $30.00. Leave the price of tokens at $1.50, bag of 10 for $15.00. Leave the Senior and Youth and Disabled fares & Fastpasses untouched. Finally, the current cost of a limited-income LifeLine pass is $35.00, a scant ten bucks less than the full price – what's up with that? This pass should be further reduced or even made free to qualifying people. Finally, I don’t know if the public knows this, but MUNI pays BART somewhere between $8-10 million per year for the public to use their Fastpasses in the City on BART. So the final change I would suggest would be to create a new Fastpass (at, say, $40) that would enable the purchaser to ride BART in San Francisco, allowing BART to keep the extra $10 so that only those folks using the BART portion of the Fastpass pay for BART service.
Think about this: What if most of MUNI's regular riders had Fastpasses or tokens? For starters, drivers could open the back doors again because passengers could easily produce proof of payment. This would really speed up loading of extra-crowded buses and make everyone's ride a little less stressful (I don't know about you, but I hate having to push through hordes of people fumbling for change or arguing about getting a free 'ride' with the driver). If you sneak on without fare and get one of those nasty tickets it might be because you actually deserve it. As it stands, people who clearly have plenty of money but feel cheated by MUNI on general principal are very much in the habit of taking their chances and not paying, while people who really can't afford either the fare, the pass, OR a ticket are taking their chances, too. I'd like to see those who CAN pay, pay. Those who can't pay should catch a break from the MTA and the City government in general. Considering all the animosity towards MUNI out there, I think the only honest way to do this is for the system to give something back to the regular patron that I know every rider cares about: Money.