by JOE ESKENAZI DECEMBER 16, 2024 (MissionLocal.org)
For all the bluster coming from some of San Francisco’s more bombastic mayoral candidates that they’d fire transit boss Jeffrey Tumlin on day one, they were never going to have the chance.
The next mayor will be sworn in on Jan. 8 and Tumlin’s contract is up at month’s end. He’s not coming back. It’s a “You can’t fire me! I … am letting my contract lapse” situation.
Tumlin’s bus is pulling out, but his capable director of transit, Julie Kirschbaum, will fill his place in an interim role — and, perhaps, far longer than that. If you’re looking for a sports analogy, Kirschbaum is to the SFMTA as Buddy Ryan was to the ’85 Bears — the coordinator overseeing the most outstanding element of the organization. That’s the defense in Ryan’s case and transit in Kirschbaum’s.
But things are bad. Real bad: Frustratingly, the SFMTA’s major problem isn’t that transit in San Francisco is crappy, even though San Franciscans love to complain about it: Ridership is steadily improving and, on some lines, exceeds pre-pandemic levels. Considering few people are going downtown, that’s a neat trick.
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Rather, a big part of the transit agency’s fiscal crisis stems from the evaporation of the money from city-operated parking lots, parking meters and citations. There just aren’t as many people driving out and about as there used to be, especially downtown — and, when they do, there are Ubers or Lyfts or even driverless Waymos to take them there.
And yet the department stands to be eviscerated. But make no mistake: When you eviscerate Muni, you eviscerate San Francisco. This will affect your life, even if you haven’t set foot on a bus or light-rail vehicle for years. There will be no downtown recovery without functional transit. You could run the Valencia bike lane through the businesses of the aggrieved merchants, and it would have a trivial impact compared to a transit-bereft downtown where BART shuts down at sunset.
Last month, the SFMTA sent up a warning flare, and a series of articles appeared, positing possible draconian service cuts in the face of a looming fiscal cliff, including — quelle horreur — suspending or cutting back the cable cars. If Muni’s purpose of seeding this message was to spur the public and the city’s leadership into serious discussions about transit and what a grown-up city needs and how to fund it, that didn’t happen. Instead, the overarching response, from Mayor-Elect Daniel Lurie on down, was hands off the cable cars — and the discussions went no further than that.
This was frustrating. Cable cars are inextricable from the character of San Francisco, and they surely bring added value to the city — though San Francisco’s longstanding association with Rice-a-Roni (ding, ding!) is not necessarily a net positive. And it warrants mentioning that, while cable car service is protected in the city charter, core Muni service is not.
Speaking of net positives, the city funds the cable cars out of the same transit monies that keep core lines operating. Lay a finger on the cable cars, and you’ve got a problem. Shrug your shoulders as the core system is allowed to collapse, bringing down the city’s viability with it, and … crickets. Hundreds of thousands of San Franciscans ride Muni every day. But it’s long been apparent that they don’t organize, don’t vote collectively and don’t constitute a constituency.
And Muni is treated accordingly.
Municipal budgeting is complicated. Transit budgeting is more complicated still. But this much is approachable: When transit is run well — and when it goes where San Franciscans want to go and when they want to go there — people take it.
We are taking Muni. Ridership numbers are at around three-quarters of what they were prior to the pandemic. On a handful of lines, ridership is equal or better to early 2020 — in some cases, way better. Those lines include the 49, the 22, the 14R, the 9, the 19 and the 12.
Are you seeing a pattern here? Other than the 14R, none of these is a major downtown feeder (the 14R runs from Daly City BART to the Embarcadero, offering plenty of chances to on- and offboard without getting near Downtown).
Merely throwing money at problems rarely solves them, especially in this city. But funding transit adequately so it works well means more people will take it — and that makes it work better still. Transit, again, is complicated — but this much isn’t. Muni’s viability benefits businesses large and small and keeps our roads from becoming parking lots.
“As a policymaker, I always felt this is lucky: This region has resources. You don’t need to convince people transit is important and don’t need to do much convincing to ask people to tax themselves to support it,” says former longtime BART commissioner and transit advocate Tom Radulovich. And then he sighs. “So why is transit hanging on a thread when these are our circumstances?”
Afrustrating answer to Radulovich’s question is that San Francisco went through the most prosperous period in its modern history, and all it has to show for it is the dysfunctional Central Subway. Billions of misbegotten federal dollars built it. And now we’re stuck paying local dollars to operate it.
It’s a shame that money can’t instead be used to stave off service cuts, which will undo the progress made in the past four-plus years. Riders, again, do not hop on buses or trains for a joyride or out of a sense of transit boosterism. If Muni is not convenient and functional — if it does not go where people need when they need it — it ceases to serve a purpose. There is little practical use for a palatial train station for a rail line that few choose to ride.
In an ideal world, you could suspend the Central Subway until Muni’s finances are less insane. Shunt its piddling ridership back into the redundant surface bus lines (which are doing fine, by the way). Save the operating costs and use that money to run the system writ large.
But that won’t happen.
Something else that should happen — but won’t — is to stop perversely funding the cable cars out of transit operating funds. Again, everyone loves cable cars. They surely make money for someone — but it’s Muni that pays for them. And in 2023, they ran at a $55.2 million operating deficit, even with ticket prices approaching ballpark beer levels (Muni’s annual deficit will hover between $239 million and $322 million by fiscal 2026-27). Wealthy people and businesses have put private funds into backing cable cars before. That should happen again.
But it likely won’t. Other than farcical calls for firing Tumlin, mass transit was a non-issue in the mayoral race: Again, Muni riders are legion but do not represent a constituency. Clearly, there would be social and political blowback for any move leading to a reduction in cable car service. The political repercussions for allowing the rest of the Muni system to dissipate, however, would apparently be far less.
That’s because dialog around transit in San Francisco is reactionary and bleak. It seems to be dominated by people grousing about crime — and, for what it’s worth, reported crime on transit is down 75 percent in the past decade — or naifs who seriously believe you could adequately replace a public transit system in a congested 47-square-mile city with 15,000 Waymos.
“The majority public opinion on public transit is formed by people who do not ride public transit,” notes Radulovich. “And the decisions are made by people who do not use it.”
The sad truth is that while promoting the wholesale replacement of a public transit system with a fleet of private cars is inane, the city’s pending evisceration of its transit agency will actually help to bring it about. For the industries that stand to benefit from the death of public transit, these are heady times.
Just wait until they invent a driverless cable car.
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JOE ESKENAZI
Managing Editor/Columnist. Joe was born in San Francisco, raised in the Bay Area, and attended U.C. Berkeley. He never left.
“Your humble narrator” was a writer and columnist for SF Weekly from 2007 to 2015, and a senior editor at San Francisco Magazine from 2015 to 2017. You may also have read his work in the Guardian (U.S. and U.K.); San Francisco Public Press; San Francisco Chronicle; San Francisco Examiner; Dallas Morning News; and elsewhere.
He resides in the Excelsior with his wife and three (!) kids, 4.3 miles from his birthplace and 5,474 from hers.
The Northern California branch of the Society of Professional Journalists named Eskenazi the 2019 Journalist of the Year.
