The past year has brought big changes to San Francisco’s streets and transit, and to the agency in charge of running them. Next year will require something close to a financial miracle to keep everything running smoothly.
After a five-year tenure dominated by the pandemic’s crushing blow to public transit, SF Municipal Transportation Agency chief Jeffrey Tumlin is leaving. Tumlin’s interim replacement will be Julie Kirschbaum, an 18-year SFMTA veteran who’s been in charge of transit since 2017. Mayor-elect Daniel Lurie has not said much about a potential replacement.
The biggest issue for Tumlin’s successor is the severe financial hit from the loss of downtown commuters. Muni ridership is at 78 percent of pre-pandemic levels. Neighborhood lines, especially the 22 Fillmore, 14 R Mission, and 49 Van Ness, are leading the recovery. Red transit-only lanes, like those along Van Ness, are speeding up routes.
But a stubborn lack of SF office workers is keeping Muni from a real rebound. With federal emergency funds expiring, the agency, with a $1.4 billion operating budget, has been scrambling for alternatives. But 2024 has been a year of frustration.
Grassroots transit activists put a tax on ride hail services on the November ballot, with proceeds to fund Muni. (Backers estimated it would raise roughly $25 million a year.) It won 57 percent of the vote but was nullified by a competing tax measure with a “poison pill” that required any competing proposition to beat its vote tally.
In Sacramento, efforts to boost state funding for local transit also failed. SF’s state Sen. Scott Wiener tried unsuccessfully in 2023 to boost Bay Area bridge tolls for transit funding, then came back this year with plans to put a regional transit funding measure to voters in 2026. That too has stalled out.
These setbacks leave SFMTA to face a $300 million deficit that starts with the 2026-2027 fiscal year. Without new funding sources, Muni will have to cut service. Last month, Tumlin previewed some options, including cuts to cable cars, ending regular Muni service at 9pm nightly, and paring back service on connector routes that often serve hard-to-reach neighborhoods.
“This is what we want to avoid,” Tumlin said at a post-election budget meeting. “The cuts we’re discussing are deep and terrifying, but also potentially real if we don’t do our work.”
Shifting from cars
The transit-only red lanes on Geary, Van Ness, and Mission aren’t the only pavement shifting away from cars. More street spaces are changing for the benefit of bikes and pedestrians, and the anger about it from some quarters was a defining story of 2024.
Prop K, a measure to permanently close the Great Highway to cars, won with 55 percent of the city vote, but the west side vote went against the initiative. Sup. Joel Engardio, who represents the Sunset District and was all-in for the closure, is now the target of a recall effort.
In the Mission District, SFMTA said it would wind down the center-running bike lane experiment on Valencia Street, reviled by many local merchants, and move the lanes early next year to the curb. But some business owners don’t like the new design, either. This month, a splinter group – the Valencia Association of Merchants, Artists, Neighbors, and Organizations (VAMANOS) – filed an appeal under California environmental law, known as CEQA.
A 2022 state law made bike, transit, and other street projects exempt from CEQA appeals, so the VAMANOS move might be a no-go. But it’s yet another sign of the tensions around street changes that disadvantage drivers. Chinatown businesses lobbied successfully to block new bike lanes, but as The Frisc reported, a growing body of research shows bike lanes don’t hurt – and often help – local shops.
It is true that bike lanes often remove parking spots. So do other changes about to take effect: longer red zones that extend 20 feet from street corners to make pedestrians more visible to drivers. It’s a new state law, and it’ll eventually remove at least one parking space from about 7,000 intersections, but SFMTA doesn’t have a count of potential lost spots.
Drivers will also have to contend with new speed cameras at 33 intersections, a pilot that starts Feb. 1.
The turn of the calendar marks a full 10 years since SF made the Vision Zero pledge to eliminate traffic deaths. The pledge hasn’t ended well. As of this writing, 34 people have died on city streets, 23 of them pedestrians. It’s the second-highest total in the Vision Zero era.
More big changes are coming. SFMTA is planning a major expansion of the city’s bike network, known as the Biking and Rolling Plan. A draft map should unroll in early 2025 after more than a year of community discussions and meetings. From 1990 to 2005, the city cut traffic injuries dramatically from about 6000 to 3000 a year. But it has made little headway since.
Another big leap forward in street safety will require getting more people out of cars and onto bikes, buses, and trains. But budget constraints might make all that a tough sell in 2025.