Calls for free Muni have ebbed and flowed for years. The latest call comes amid higher stakes. With San Francisco struggling to cope with a fundamentally changed downtown and the hole it has blasted in the city budget, Sup. Connie Chan says free transit is one of her keys to an economic recovery.
Chan is now chair of the supervisors’ budget committee, and much of SF’s economic plans must pass her committee’s muster. She says restoring the 51 shuttered Muni lines to their pre-COVID service, and eventually making the entire system free, is crucial to an “equitable recovery.”
Muni’s ultimate boss — Mayor London Breed — also believes in more Muni to help downtown. The transit agency just restored an express commuter bus from the Richmond District. But it’s not free.
The last push for fare-free Muni came in 2021 with the same economic recovery argument and resulted in the elimination of fares for people under 19. There’s a growing body of evidence from around the country that going whole-hog could have mixed results here.
Yonah Freemark, a planning and transit researcher at the Urban Institute, recently gathered and analyzed a range of examples of real-life experiments in free transit. He found that overall, free transit increases ridership. That bump in ridership looks enticing, but it comes with a caveat for San Francisco if downtown remains partially empty. (Office vacancy is nearly 28 percent; it was 4 percent pre-COVID.)
Freemark notes that existing riders making more frequent trips, not new customers, represent much of the increase. Those riders are youth, the elderly, and low-income residents — not generally the downtown commuter types. “It encourages more low-income people to go to the doctor, see friends and use it more,” he notes.
But that doesn’t solve SF’s downtown problem. “What is keeping riders off the routes headed downtown is not the fares, but the lack of destinations,” says Daniel Rodriguez, a professor of city and regional planning at UC Berkeley. “Being fare-free won’t fix that.”
Freemark also found that free transit did not necessarily entice drivers out of cars, which puts a dent in the green argument for it.
What gets people out of cars and onto transit is faster, more reliable service. That’s not in opposition to going fare-free, Freemark concluded in his informal study. But with “ineffective transit almost everywhere, there’s much work to do to build support for better options,” he wrote, adding that he doesn’t see a cut-and-dry answer to the fare-free question.
That was then, this is now
Freemark’s conclusions look similar to what the SF controller reported 15 years ago. Like now, SF was going through tough economic times, but with at least one huge difference: downtown offices were still full of workers.
When the controller’s office studied the potential impact of free Muni in 2008, it looked at pilot projects in Austin, Denver, Trenton, N.J., and other cities. Overall, ridership went up, but in Trenton and Austin, bus drivers lobbied to end the trials in part because of safety concerns, with a rise in threatening incidents among riders. Neither city has free transit today.
One smaller system, Chapel Hill, N.C., also saw more ridership — but without the safety problem. In fact, the college town still goes fare-free. “They’re a small system with a singular destination: the university,” says Rodriguez.
It also helps that the University of North Carolina and a neighboring city fund the bus system. This is essential, Freemark says: “Asking the transit agency to pay for free service is asking them to spend money on that instead of improving service. You need other units of government to step in.”
After Sup. Dean Preston introduced legislation in April 2021 to run a three-month free Muni pilot, he and his colleagues approved a $12.5 million appropriation from the city’s COVID reserve fund to pay for it. Breed vetoed the bill, however, and the supervisors didn’t have the votes to override her.
Meanwhile, SFMTA presented an analysis of a free Muni system in May 2021 and found it would cost an additional $269 million per year. (This year’s budget to run Muni’s daily operations is $1.36 billion.)
The money saved by getting rid of the administration of discount programs and fare collection systems — Clipper cards, pay machines, and the like — would be dwarfed by the loss of fares, plus the increase in service to meet the expected higher ridership, based on other cities’ experience.
The prospect of digging a bigger fiscal hole with free service comes as the agency must wrestle with years of deficits — up to $214 million by 2026 as SF’s general fund, Muni’s top revenue source, is shrinking due to the anemic downtown recovery. (SF is projecting a $728 million deficit over the next two years and far worse after that, topping $1.4 billion in 2027–2028.)
Revenues from parking, which SFMTA also collects, are at 85 percent of 2019 levels. Revenues from transit have not rebounded as much; with non-paying students fueling a ridership bump, the agency must rely even more on adults to boost revenues.
Federal rescue funds that have propped up SFMTA during COVID are mostly gone, with SFMTA holding small percentages of the total to cover shortfalls during the next two years.
“We want to make Muni affordable,” SFMTA spokesperson Erica Kato said via email. “We will continue to seek ongoing sources of revenue to provide the level of service all San Franciscans need and deserve.”
No alternate route
Chan says her call for free Muni is not just about economic recovery. It’s also a matter of meeting the city’s transit and climate pledges. She wants a right to transit access for all San Franciscans, starting with low-income residents.
Those rights already exist for 18 percent of the city. In addition to people under 19, Muni is free for people experiencing homelessness, 65 and older, and low-to-moderate-income adults with mobility issues.
To expand beyond these groups, Chan recognizes the need for regional and state funds, as she told reporters last week. But she didn’t offer specifics. The Frisc made several attempts to contact the supervisor and her aides for more details but received no response.
Preston is also calling for state and federal intervention. “We must do everything possible to get riders back on public transit,” he said in a statement sent to The Frisc. “That means full service restoration, no fare increases, and pushing the federal and state governments to step up and fund public transit as part of our economic recovery.”
Preston nods to an active pilot program in Boston, where $8 million in federal funds are paying for three free bus routes with 97 percent of riders deemed “transit critical” — low-income, restricted vehicle access, people of color, the elderly, and others with mobility issues. Ridership on these lines has nearly doubled.
Boston mayor Michelle Wu knows outside funding is needed to expand the program; she even did her own study as a member of the city council and identified several grants that could apply.
It’s one thing to fund a university-based system in a college town. It’s another for San Francisco and its $1 billion-plus annual transit budget as it faces existential uncertainty. Transit fares and parking fees accounted for more than 80 percent of the operating budget before COVID. The pandemic crushed them both. In the coming year they’re expected to provide 27 percent of the total budget.
For Muni to be more than a shell of its former self, something must replace that money. Chan and Preston — and many others — are right to look to Sacramento and beyond. Getting rid of fares entirely would make that plea more urgent.
[Update 3/31/23: This story was changed to reflect that SF supervisors voted to pay for a free Muni pilot with $12.5 million from the city’s COVID reserve fund.]