SF MTA's New Budget Cut Plan: Almost All Buses Will Show Up Less Often, If At All

What a disaster.

Why can't Muni just get a federal bailout?

Also: how much money would Muni save if we fired all the MTA executives?

Clearly these "executives" can't even be bothered to put down their wine and caviar for half a minute to sign a request for bailout money, so who needs them? What have they done for us?

We'd be better off with a Taco Bell cashier running the system. At least a minimum wage cashier understands how to handle money and wouldn't cost very much.

@Xenu: Muni does get a federal bailout. Every year they get cash from Washington (and Sacramento, and City Hall.) They also got a bunch of ARRA funds. It's just, you know, still not enough. Every transit agency in the country gets more expensive with each year; and subsidies aren't keeping up.

Here's a breakdown that we did of how much money Muni gets from various sources: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sfappeal/4253199536/

Also: I think it was Greg who said that "Transit First apparently means that transit is the first to get cut."

There's nothing in here about meters. This would be baffling, since we know that San Francisco is losing money on cheap meters, and that adaptive pricing would both raise money and increase availability (so, less circling the block).

I would be baffled by the omission of meter rate increases, except that we know how important cheap parking is to our SUV-driving mayor. Excuse me, I mean our SUV-chauffeured mayor.

One minor correction - The MTA no longer gets any of the gas tax money voters approved (they approved 80% for roads, 20% for transit systems) - the idea being if you have a gas tax at least have the tax go to something related to moving around.

Gov. S and the Democrats cut this out completely. It was ruled illegal, but the money was still stolen anyway. Now Arnie wants to use legal tricks to circumvent it for good so your gas tax money goes to servicing debt Arnie issued early in his term.

The reason the MTA is having such problems is because a big piece of their income was taken away without much warning. Until you find a way to make up that hole, no amount of cuts will make up the difference.

The mayor could give two shits about Muni, and his board members (with notable exceptions like Mr. Oka) don't care either. Hell, Tom Nolan admitted that the MTA board members are stooges for the Mayor in print, and his background as a suburbanite politician ( having served on the SAN MATEO COUNTY Board of Supervisors) makes him a poor fit for serving on the board of an urban agency.

Boy I don't envy working at the MTA. It's a shit position to be in. The best comment I've seen regarding the situation was on SF Metblog (I think) and was to the effect of "the MTA has just given up." There is plenty of inefficiency within the MTA, but all they're proposing is to cut service. It's a lame response to a lame situation.

But what about the MTC? Ya, I know Daly is the only person representing the city aside from Newsom's hack. But... the Oakland based MTC voted to yank funding from MUNI and divert it to BART's Oakland Airport Connector. Just in case. Do the math. They're cutting funding to roughly a million riders a day (MUNI, AC Transit, GGT, Caltrain... add quite a few more for BART) for the benefit of maybe a million riders a year (OAC). It's not just the removed from transit politicos that are hurting the situation here.

In looking at the proposed cuts there's a lot of double speak. The proposed reduction in service on the metro lines doesn't amount to much because they're not meeting those headways anyhow. How much is it going to suck to turn trains back at SFSU with the unreliable equipment there?

The cuts that really chap my ass are to the 108 (D6 if anyone's counting). You cannot walk or ride a bike off that island. You need either a car or a bus to get you to/from the island.

P.S. Any chance of finding something that's not as awful to use as Scribd is to host a PDF? Sheesh.

I wonder if anyone has told MUNI that passing on a transaction fee is in violation of the Merchant Agreement with VISA and MC.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_are_different_ways_to_pass_on_transaction_fees_for_accepting_credit_cards_to_customers

Re scribd, we were just trying to find a fast, convenient, and accessible way to provide our readers with documents that weren't available elsewhere. If you have an alternative that you find less "awful," let's hear it.

Otherwise, I'll be happy to refund the money you pay to read this site and you can go read the Chronicle's report, where they don't even let you see the documents that they, too, presumably had to bother to request from the MTA.

Will the reduced J-KT-L frequency during peak times eliminate the near-constant backup of trains in the Market St tunnel? If not, what is there plan to eliminate the problem of trains backing up? Does a computer system monitor the trains arrival in the tunnel, or is it managed by an employee? Is there a reason trains seem to have trouble removing themselves from the line at Embarcadero?

How many layoffs will occur as a result of these cutbacks? What criteria will be used when determining what staff to let go?

Has the MTA determined exactly how high they can raise fares/costs of passes before it results in a budget-harming reduction in ridership? What is that cost? Have studies been conducted to determine what that cost might be?

How much do they project it will cost to implement the new system of multiple types of transit passes? Will combination passes be available, i.e. fast pass +cable car + express or fast pass + BART + express?

And finally, are they embarrassed at their inability to run a urban transit network? Have they looked to other cities to try and discover what they are doing wrong? Do other cities look down on them with ridicule? And how many of them use MUNI on a regular basis?

They've probably worked out a special merchant agreement. For high volume merchants, they're willing to screw the customers that much more (or at least look the other way).

@Eve I'd say pretty much anything constitutes an improvement over scribd's nasty interface. Honest suggestion? Google docs, no flash, no login. A quick search also turned up drop.io which at least lets you upload and download the files without wading through spam + registration.

What the Chron (well, Ms. Gordon) does? Offloads them to a free file uploading site like rapidshare.

Here's the file from free to view, no flash required, free to download PDF Google Docs:

https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B2HnwucvshpnNjNiMzA5YzQtMTQwMy00ZGRkLTk3OTItZGRkMmE1ZTA5ZjRh&hl=en

P.S. Yes, the MTA ought to be hosting that stuff themselves.

Nobody likes the proposals they are putting out. I'm not fond of the express buses being put on premium passes since it would be an extra $120 a year to dish out for the right to ride. But don't forget, not every passenger uses it as an "express," that includes the folks on Stockton getting out of Chinatown to Market street on the 8X, and people like myself who rides the 38AX for a short hop to and from 33rd Avenue (that's because of the 18 reroute). By using that plan, people won't buy the premium pass since taking the 30 Stockton or the 38L can still get you to your destination by just about a few minutes extra, but this also means packing the local and limited buses with more commuters.

I don't really understand why people who buy passes and other Muni media should ever pay a fee for it. So is it fare for people to get punished if they use a pre-tax transit debit card program like the Commuter Check Card?

Just how much worse can the local bus lines get? Certain bus lines only come every 20 minutes, so adding another five minutes to wait turns the bus line into a complete waste of your time. Bus broke down? Enjoy waiting up to 50+ minutes.

One I'm surprised about is having peak M-Ocean view trains and having SF State as the terminal. SF State is a heavily used metro platform and can use some extra attention.

I don't see an embed option for either of your suggestions, which is key for us.

If the Chron is regularly uploading documents on their own to share with readers, that's a great new thing and I'm glad they're doing it, but she certainly did not do it in the case of these documents.

The MTA has already decided it's appropriate to pay more for faster, more reliable service in the Mission. It even comes with its own police force (BART PD). Why not express buses?

@Eve the Chron's intrepid public transportation reporter is going elsewhere to share files because (I assume) the Chron is too lame to host the files themselves. As for embedding:

https://docs.google.com/viewer

It takes a *tiny* bit of finangling, but you can embed your Google Docs with that. But when was the last time you embedded a scribd docu vs linked to it?

Sure, Muni gets a bailout. But that's not enough make up for what's happening this year. Not even close.

So why does high speed rail, Bart, etc. get all these federal grants? My point is that the money is (or was) there, but the "executives" at Muni couldn't be bothered to raise their hands when the feds asked who needed money.

I have never seen a Rachel Gordon article that had downloaded docs embedded, so this is news to me. Good for her. In any case, it was not done with these documents, in her piece today.

The google docs embed won't work consistently within our CMS (Movable Type). We are told that this should change sometime soon, but not yet.

As for your question, "But when was the last time you embedded a scribd docu vs linked to it?" the answer is today, in the article you are commenting on right now.

For the record, Scribd works fine for me, and seems like a good solution.

A few questions I have are:

What are their proposed cutbacks regarding staff?

When their product is providing transportation, and the majority of San Franciscans are already at least somewhat dissatisfied with that product, why would further service cuts and fare increases be anything but the last possible resort?

What are the numbers on the $70 bart/muni pass? won't having two SKUs of fast pass complicate things? do drivers really want to explain to people the difference 100 times a day, and deal with all of the confused/angry passengers who don't know why they can ride the 71 but not the 71L? I know I opted out. Also, at a certain price point a fast pass stops making sense, which means people won't buy them, which means longer load times/more customer service time/bigger hassles for everyone around.

Wouldn't having owl service come once an hour make it basically unusable? And is it safe to have people waiting at bus stops for an hour at 3 in the morning?

It's absurd that employees for a transit agency have paid parking in a city like SF where very few private employees have a similar benefit.

Any cuts should be accompanied with an increase in meter fares, since these cuts essentially encourage people to drive.

So I'm going to go all old-school here. What ever happened to enforcing everyone paying their fair fare share? Because, since Jan. 1, 2010, every bus that I've ridden has had back door boarders (and by this, I mean getting on the bus via sneaking through the rear door. This has nothing to do with sexual acts, please, so stop giggling at your desk). On one 38 alone, over 8 stops, I counted over 35 people getting on via the back door. And on the morning 21 and 5 commutes downtown, the "service improvements" haven't done anything to improve crowding or fee collection.

@Patrick: An "L" bus is not an express. That's a limited.

Public Transit is a primary resource of a civilized city.
Public Transit has been badly managed in San Francisco during
fat budgets and thin budgets. The currently proposed cuts are an
insult to the citizens of this city. And the absence of coordinated actions
by the city government is a further outrage.

The Governor of California misappropriated state transit funds in
contravention of the criminal law, correct?
HAS SF FILED A LAW SUIT AND A CRIMINAL COMPLAINT AGAINST ARNOLD?

The head of the MTA, Mr. Ford has a salary of $400,000, correct?
DOES THE LATEST AUSTERITY PLAN INCLUDE REDUCING HIS SALARY
TO $100,000? IT SHOULD! IT MUST!

The Muni's constant fare reductions and service reductions render it a
completely dysfunctional "system". A dysfunctional Muni
does not serve the citizens of San Francisco in any way,
if the Muni cannot be run as an effective transit resource, then
shut the whole damned thing down.

And By the Way, the tourists do NOT appreciate decrepit , stifling in Summer,
"quaint" F-Line cars. They won't pay for them (they usually walk away
in disgust when they have waited 20 min. for an F car), and we shouldn't
have to be subjected to them either. The cable cars are our one proper
quaint an effective transit curiosity, FIX the F-LINE!

Furthermore, the F-Line is mandated to serve the area it traverses, but it
DOES NOT, it serves only the endpoints (on the Ferry Bldg --Fisherman's Wharf segment), SF residents are ROUTINELY passed by at stops internal to that
segment.

The "information" signs are notoriously inaccurate. "Arriving" may be the
unchanged state for 5 min, then the thing goes back to 7min and starts counting
down again. Call muni, what do they say? "Maybe the driver has the
GPS turned off" Turned off? Who's running the show at Muni?
maybe even $100,000 is too much salary for Mr. Ford.!

Good point made above about transit to "treasure" island. The city is
involved with developers to build a combination of public housing and
60 story highrise luxury housing out there. The highrise folks don't use
buses and will continue to drive their daimlers. The dysfunction of the muni
thus condemns everybody else out there to Alcatraz status.

Xenu is right about the execs at Muni. A lot of what is wrong with Muni
has nothing to do with the overall budget , it has to do with the management.

Can somebody explain why at this time, in the middle of this economic crisis,
certain "interests" are militating for the construction of more underground transit
in SF. Has nobody out here ever heard the words "Big Dig"?

Boston blew billions on the Big Dig and got nearly nothing for that and 20 years
of construction disruptions.

That amount of money would fix Muni's problems for decades.
Screw the Brylcream fantasy projects, get some fed transit money
for concrete, efficient support of our transit system!

Fire Ford! Fire the Brylcream Mayor, Fire all the Supes (their staff
doesn't know or care about Muni issues (there's no wine and cheese factor
in transit policy --except when the mayor and the SFMTA head get together)

I see a lot in the report about tax hikes and budget cuts...but nothing about budget cuts to the employees. (The single biggest cost to SFMTA) Why hasnt the Union workers taken a cut like the rest of us? I know a lot of people laid off or taking salary cuts to keep things running including myself. We pay taxes then they continue to hike taxes and fees for something I already "supposedly" paid into. I use the bus and I cant believe that with all the people that ride the system it is always bankrupt. Get rid of the Unions!!!! Busdrivers should earn a decent wage, but when we give them all these ridiculous benefits we cannot sustain the current system and we will always be looking for more and more money. Until we change this current system this arguement will continue to end with a bad taste in your mouth....and it's not the guy next to you on Muni.

I think the bottom line is that Muni has existed for so long as both an object of looting and a wasteful entity that MTA can't conceive of cleaning house or trimming fat, even in the face of disastrous fund diversions from on high. They'd rather risk public wrath by continuing to strip the transit system bare.

And I hate to say it, but I think they are going to get away with it. Everyone is angry about what's happening here, but what steps are we taking to actually turn the tide?

I thought it would help to come up with a succinct list of demands, and see if I could get people to either support it or tell me how it should be different - just so we could have something we agree on and put it before our elected officials.

This was what I came up with:

http://blog.sanfranciscodays.com/2010/01/muni-petition.html

I sent it to all 11 Supervisors and got back 2 responses (Carmen Chu and David Campos).

If anyone has any other ideas about what we can actually do about Muni, I would love to hear it.

Good start sanfranciscodays, I would like also to see enumerated action items
relating to the specifics of current Muni operating procedures (see my posts above).
Certainly the management of Muni should take a 50% pay cut or more if this is
what they want to foist upon us. I'm sure most anybody can live on $200,000 instead
of $400,000.
I called the mayor's office, lot of dissimulation from the clerks.
Everybody should call the mayor's office and remind the staff to remind him
that his supply of brylcream will be cut off if he does not restore and preserve
core public transit services in San Francisco.

We demand that the head of the Muni take a 75 percent pay cut or be fired.
We demand that the city take legal action against the Governor's misappropriations
of public transit funds.
We demand that the Muni service levels not be cut further.
We demand that Muni management is improved to a minimum level
of reliability.
We demand that old muni buses and F-car relics be retired in favor of
new, efficient, modern buses.
(The Muni will be sued for heat related fatalities or other heat related injuries on the
F-Line in Summer with the current lot of 100 year old cars)
We demand action NOW.
We demand responsive attention from the Mayor.
We demand responsive attention from the Board of Supervisors.

@attlee - thanks for the comment. One of the things I'm struggling with is what we can realistically demand from elected officials (those who are planning to stick around), versus what "should" happen but probably isn't possible.

On the subject of salaries, Nathaniel Ford's salary is the highest at Muni, currently at $308,837 (not including incentive-based bonuses), followed by 100+ others in the $100k to $200k range (mostly engineers and managers) based on 2007 data. More info here:

http://blog.sanfranciscodays.com/2010/01/muni-all-things-considered.html

As for demanding anything from the Mayor, I haven't even tried. I think he is as done with us as we are with him.

"I don't see an embed option for either of your suggestions, which is key for us. "

Actually, thanks a lot for embedding it. Because of that it was able to overload the memory and crash my browser. If you'd actually put it behind a link I would have had the choice to peruse it if I wanted to rather than just getting to crash out so quickly and easily. The same goes for video.

Seriously people, but I'm getting sick as hell of having embedded, in-line video and all sorts of other crap on almost every site these days. I don't want to watch a half-dozen video clips on an article, but it certainly increases the likelihood that it won't load properly and if it does it will do so slowly and with a greater chance of crashing Firefox.

I don't see how you can view embedding as anything but a bad thing.

I second @PhilD's question: "Has the MTA determined exactly how high they can raise fares/costs of passes before it results in a budget-harming reduction in ridership? What is that cost? Have studies been conducted to determine what that cost might be?"

I would add- can they publish the results of any such study for the public to see? If there has been a study for San Francisco, how does it compare to other cities' results?

What is Muni's plan to profitability over the next 5 years? 10 years?

The changes proposed seem to be entirely shortsighted. Cutting Night Owl service to once an hour? That'll probably just decrease ridership, which will allow them to justify cutting the service to say, once every other hour next year. Cutting frequency of buses/trains will also just strain the system, not make it more efficient. Residents will be forced to stuff themselves into the back of buses or find other ways to get to work. What's the point of a public transportation system if it's unavailable?