Several days a week, Olivia Weaver picks up the 44 O’Shaughnessy bus near her home in the Portola to get to her part-time job at the California Academy of Sciences. With a tote bag bearing Muni’s friendly wavy logo swinging from her shoulder, she jostles for a spot between groups of students commuting to one of the multiple schools along the route.
Six years ago, Olivia was one of these student riders, and she credits her loyalty to this long-term relationship. Whether she is traveling to one of her two jobs, visiting friends, or running errands, Olivia prefers to take the bus. Where she doesn’t typically ride the Muni, however, is downtown.
Olivia is like much of San Francisco these days. The lack of downtown ridership has Muni, and other transit systems, in financial crisis. Budget negotiations in Sacramento just restored or added about $4 billion in funding statewide, but it’s a short-term fix for a decades-old problem. (And Gov. Gavin Newsom still hasn’t signed the final budget.)
The longer-term fix is obvious if you stare at a Muni map. The shape that emerges has a definite focal point. Like many transit systems, Muni is a hub and spoke network that works best at moving people in and out of downtown (the hub) via routes (spokes) that radiate into the city.
Though Muni has more cross-spoke coverage than, say, Chicago, it can still be difficult to travel between neighborhoods. Connections might require inefficient travel in and out of the hub, and perimeter routes are often slow and infrequent.
This design has roots in midcentury urban planning, with office workers commuting back and forth from a central business district. This bias is inequitable; many people work outside the parameters of 9 to 5 and take transit for unpaid labor, such as running errands and accompanying family members to appointments.
Now, as COVID has rearranged the city, the Muni map no longer reflects how San Franciscans move around. In Muni’s 2022 rider survey, less than half (45 percent) of respondents said they were using transit to get to work.
Since April 2020, weekend ridership recovery has consistently outpaced weekday trips. While bus routes into the hub have failed to rebound post-pandemic, the routes that have bounced back fastest, even topping their pre-COVID ridership, connect across the spokes, especially those that ferry students to and from schools.
The kids are all right
This is somewhat intuitive; students are less likely to have access to a car and thus rely on the bus. Moreover, Muni is free for riders 18 and under. Many of these popular routes, though, can feel slow and overcrowded, especially at morning peaks.
Travel times can increase dramatically if a rider has to wait for multiple buses after the first one is too full to take more passengers. Even though students have organized since the late 2010s for “rapid” treatment on one route that serves a big swath of schools, as The Frisc reported this spring, SFMTA has demurred, saying it would require trade-offs elsewhere.
To be fair, Muni has boosted ridership by improving the speed and frequency of some popular lines. The 22 Fillmore and 49 Van Ness are booming, thanks to dedicated or “rapid” lanes that unclog their routes.
Yet the matter of trade-offs nags in this moment of financial crisis. Muni is about to run out of federal COVID funding that has kept operations afloat the last few years. The next state budget, which Gov. Newsom must sign at the end of this month, apparently will provide a lifeline — thanks to intense negotiations led by SF’s state senator Scott Wiener and a lot of grassroots pressure. (SFMTA officials also warned that 20 lines would be cut without the extra cash.)
Post-COVID questions facing Muni remain urgent: Should priority go to fare-paying office workers who will supplement Muni’s budget in the short term, or should the agency focus on the long game and attempt to win the hearts and future wallets of student customers like Olivia Weaver?
In truth, this framing creates a false dichotomy. We can’t just cut off transit downtown. Thousands of people still commute to the hub, albeit thousands less than in 2019.
What’s more, downtown is the heart of the physical system we’ve got, where cross-bay voyagers transfer from the streetcar to the underground BART, where buses turn at the Salesforce Transit Center, and lost tourists can take solace in the certainty that all roads lead back to Market Street. Any equitable lasting change to the network needs to take the inertia of infrastructure and urban memory into account.
At the same time, a Muni realignment must accept that offices are not reaching their pre-COVID levels, perhaps not ever. When the gig economy and remote work allow more people to earn their living anywhere and anytime, a transportation system that focuses on shuttling rush-hour commuters in and out of a central business district is obsolete.
This isn’t to say that downtown will never be a destination again, but rather that it is one area among many, and it’s given an inequitable amount of resources by our overstretched transit agency.
Even without looming cuts, the time is right to reassess service for a post-pandemic world. One lesson that came out of COVID was that much of SF’s cultural and economic activity these days takes place in the residential mixed-use neighborhoods. For many, the reason to head downtown on a Saturday is to visit a museum or the Ferry Building farmers’ market, whereas plenty travel to the Haight or the Mission to visit friends, hang out in a park, get dinner, or go dancing.
Many downtown offices remain vacant as companies reorient themselves to remote work. Meanwhile, jobs that can’t be done from home, such as health care, life sciences, and specialty retail, aren’t concentrated in Muni’s hub, but dispersed among campuses and neighborhood commercial districts. This is not to say that downtown will never be a destination again, but rather to argue that it is one area among many, and it’s given an inequitable amount of resources by our overstretched transit agency. This route mismatch is leading to worse service for riders, which in turn is losing Muni money.
Learning COVID lessons
We learned a lot during the pandemic, and those lessons should be applied to Muni’s recovery plan. In April 2020, the SFMTA pared back service from 80 bus routes to just 17. Over the next two and a half years, routes were brought back as needed for vital network connections and crowding relief — essentially a survival of the fittest in reverse.
Consider the 2 Clement and the 31 Balboa, both restored later in the pandemic, the two routes running parallel, straight-shot stretches between the west side and downtown. Sandwiched between an additional three Richmond to downtown routes (the 1 California of Marvel fame, the 38 and 38R Geary, and the 5 Fulton), one could argue that the 2 and 31 are pretty redundant, as far as spokes go.
Muni’s own data bear that out; both lines had recovered less than half their riders as of April 2023, whereas the rapid routes along Geary and Fulton were performing much better. This phenomenon isn’t a surprise to riders, though.
In a February 2023 community survey on perceptions of Muni, the majority of respondents across all income and racial groups felt that improving the speed, frequency, and reliability of Muni buses should be the SFMTA’s top priority, and were willing to walk a few blocks further (say, from Clement to California Street) if they could count on more reliable service.
In that same survey, only 59 percent of Muni riders resonated with the concept that Muni “does a good job of serving the whole city,” which was down from 2021. Sixty percent of riders described Muni as crowded. Muni knows it must do better by its customers, but still has work to do incorporating their feedback. At a recent hearing, Muni officials admitted that the latest survey didn’t try to reach its hearty base of student riders.
In response to pleas for more money, politicians have insisted on more accountability and building goodwill with riders, because their votes will be crucial for a major transit bond in an upcoming election (possibly November 2024).
One big step toward that effort is setting aside outdated planning that gives preference to white-collar business district commuters. There’s a lot of opportunity in the city’s crowded crosstown buses for lifelong riders, a vanguard generation of a Muni that’s more in tune with the way San Francisco moves.
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