Starting July 1, many San Franciscans’ transit is about to get a bit more expensive. SFMTA, which basically oversees everything involving getting around the city but BART, has decided to increase their prices for many transit options due to, the MTA says, harsh economic conditions. As you can imagine, people are not happy about this!
As Muni Diaries and Akit warned us in months past, next month “A” and “M” passes, as well as Interagency monthly stickers are all being increased by $2, while Disabled/Youth/Senior passes and fares and almost anything related to cable cars are going up by $1.
Needless to say, that doesn’t include the sneaky $2 fee many commuter check users have tacked onto their monthly passes. Tangentially, at what level of fee increases will you just skip the monthly pass and just put cash on your Clipper card? Just wondering.
Sadly, renting a cable car is also about to get more expensive, as everyone’s favorite two hour cable car rental price shoots up from $704 to $727. There goes my weekend, SFMTA.
Residential parking permits are also going up by $2. Many of the other fees and fines SFMTA offers are also increasing. Fares that aren’t changing are Muni cash fares, their school coupon book, and BART-to-Muni transfers.
As you can imagine, no one is especially excited about this: blogger Wandering Bell says
I mean, anytime they can’t manage their budget, it’s the ridership who gets to pay the price. Our unelected, and apparently unaccountable MTA leadership has managed to increase the cost of ridership while decreasing the service.
Streetsblog reader Kevin notes that
That’s seriously messed up that the Muni Fastpass is so close in price to a parking spot in SF, given that private autos is one reason that Muni is delayed everyday.
The nearly 70 comments (at publication time) posted on SF Gate in response to this news were predictably SF Gate ish, here’s an example:
As usual Muni is trying to make the paying riders pay for the fare evaders as well as their clipper system fail. Pretty soon it will be cheaper to drive
than take transit. Maybe what Muni really wants is only for the tourists and
the rich to ride their stinking buses. Well they can have them. Who wants to ride
a bus and be annoyed in 3 languages? And never mind everytime the bus stops at a corner it has to shout out the # and it’s destination. Ban MUNI! come on this is the city that loves to ban! fare evaders and expensive computer upgrades should not be our problem(the ones that pay)
In a release sent to media, the MTA says
Full lists of the new fee and fare amounts can be found at:
www.sfmta.com/cms/pnews/July2011SustainableStreetsfeeandfineincreases
www.sfmta.com/cms/malerts/July2011TransitFareandFeeIncreases
But sadly, at publication time those links didn’t work. Oh, Muni. We had better luck with these links:
July 2011 Transit Fare, Fee and Fine Increases
July 2011 Sustainable Streets fee and fine increases
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