Muni’s latest data shows ridership on the city’s system of buses, cable cars, streetcars and light rail has rebounded dramatically from pandemic levels. It reports that ridership is at 74% of pre-pandemic levels and 92% of those levels on the weekends. The agency also trumpeted reductions in the number of subway delays.
In late October, the agency even celebrated a milestone – having more than a half-million average daily riders for the first time in years. That same month, Mayor London Breed announced the agency secured a $130-million state grant to “modernize Muni’s train control system and make the Muni metro more efficient and reliable.” In late 2023, Muni received nearly $309 million of the state’s $776-million bailout of financially struggling Bay Area transit systems.
Yet the agency now says that continuing inflation and the end of federal pandemic relief will leave it facing a $260-million to $322-million deficit beginning in 2026 – and that massive system cuts in routes and operating hours are coming. Transit riders can’t win for losing.
Sure, Muni failed to secure a tax increase in the November election, but even if it had passed it would have only provided $25 million a year in extra funding. Voters actually backed the tax on ridesharing and autonomous-vehicle companies (Measure L) 57% to 43%, but it failed for a rather complicated reason involving a separate tax measure.
Measure M revamped the city’s tax code, essentially raising business taxes on larger business and reducing them for smaller businesses. That measure, which passed 69% to 31%, included a provision that would nullify Measure L unless it received more votes than Measure M.
Muni officials are now predictably threatening drastic cuts in service. The controller office’s Muni Funding Working Group, which makes recommendations to the agency board, has proposed a variety of emergency measures to deal with impending budget shortfalls. Transit supporters would like us to believe that the agency is serious about boosting the system’s efficiency, but a closer look shows those particular proposals to be superficial at best.
Per Streets Blog SF, the working group wants to accelerate road improvements designed to speed up bus routes, automate parking enforcement with mail-in tickets and slow hiring. But even if Muni’s estimates are correct, those measures “total up to less than $14 million in cost savings for the agency, so more solutions will be needed to plug the full $322 million hole,” per the article.
So what about the remaining $308 million shortfall? Muni’s main proposals involve the following service cuts, per KQED:
- Suspending service on lower-utilized routes:This would eliminate 20 routes serving about 50,000 riders. Net savings: $63 million.
- Reducing service frequency by as much as 50%:Would affect the system’s busiest routes… . Net savings: $71 million.
- Suspending regular bus and train service at 9 p.m.each night and replace with less frequent Owl Service. It would affect as many as 28 routes. Net savings: $14 million.
- Suspending cable car and historic streetcar service:Net savings: $33 million. …
- (R)educing fare subsidies for youth, seniors, lower-income residents and people with disabilities.
Even with those dramatic cuts, Muni could still face a deficit of $122 million, per the article. Transit agencies and activists routinely chide people for relying on automobiles and private transit alternatives such as Uber, but it’s hard to encourage people to switch to public transit when transit agencies are constantly threatening to slash service. Boosting fares for people most dependent on transit seems shortsighted, as well. KQED notes that 38% of Muni riders are low income.
This is a dispiriting last-minute strategy that’s reflective of the agency’s long-term failure to manage its budgets, control union demands and streamline its operations. By the way, Muni granted big wage hikes to its workers over the summer. The cuts discourage new riders and punish existing ones at the same time. They also annoy the city’s tourists.
Consider the cable-car proposal. Transportation expert Randal O’Toole argues that this proposal is the latest example of Washington Monument Strategy, which refers to the National Park Service’s stopping visits to the Washington Monument after the Nixon administration proposed budget cuts. It only saved pennies, but prodded angry tourists to contact their representatives to support more funding.
“Considering all the bad publicity San Francisco has received lately, its commercial interests don’t want to do anything to depress tourism still further,” O’Toole explained. “Muni knows this, of course, which is why it is floating cutting the cable cars as a trial balloon. It obviously hopes that local taxpayers will eagerly support tax increases to keep the cable cars climbing halfway to the stars.”
Municipal transit agencies want to lure people onto buses and trains, but even as ridership increases they still can’t control their spending. When they fail to secure a constant stream of new subsidies and tax increases they cut routes and limit travel times, which then discourages new riders. Lawmakers will continue to propose bailouts, so we won’t see an end to this bad-news spiral until our nation rethinks the way it provides transit service.
Steven Greenhut is director of the Pacific Research Institute’s Free Cities Center. Write to him at [email protected].
