Since last June Mayor Breed’s “San Francisco Muni Reliability Working Group” has looked for ways to improve overall Muni performance. Chaired by SFMTA Vice-Chair Gwyneth Borden and former City Controller Ed Harrington, the group was comprised of 13 individuals, including two San Francisco Supervisors and representatives of the Transportation Workers Union and various other organizations.

The group’s final report contains 66 recommendations, broken down as follows: Technical and Operations: 18, Workforce and Hiring: 24, Context and Regional: 17, and Governance and Organizational: 7. BATWG has reviewed the report and has the following responses:

General:

There are many good ideas embodied in the report. However the Muni is part of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (MTA), a complex and multi-layered 6,000 person organization operating in a difficult fishbowl environment subject to virtually continuous public scrutiny. No group of 13, no matter how dedicated, could adequately identify and respond to all the opportunities to improve the functionality of such an organization. For this reason the Mayor’s group was quite dependent upon Muni management for information and therefore took many of its improvement ideas from proposals already in circulation.  The Mayor’s effort is ok as far as it goes, but more is needed.

Bringing a very large and growing organization like the MTC including Muni up to its full operating potential will require periodic management audits of the entire organization. These audits would necessarily have to be comprehensive and completely independent.

Technical and Operations:

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BART can’t go everywhere and never will be able to go everywhere. Therefore, to get the Region out of gridlock something else will be necessary. The activation of a regional bus system is one promising opportunity.  

A high-quality, out-of-congestion, regional bus system has been talked about ever since MTC formed in 1971. Yet every year struggling to get to where BART can’t go or pushing into increasingly jammed BART trains becomes more time-consuming and difficult. 

Whatever is done must be attractive enough to cause a significant number of solo drivers to become less dependent on their automobiles. The network of longer distance buses would therefore have to be highly efficient. Buses would need to travel faster than the adjacent traffic as well as be safe, reliable, and comfortable. In order for any of this to work the buses would have to operate in their own lanes, separate from mixed-flow traffic.

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As indicated in a previous issue of this newsletter, because the SFMTA deploys one and two-car trains in the Market Street subway instead of the four and five-car trains the multi-billion dollar facility was designed to accommodate, the subway and adjoining Muni Metro tunnels currently operate at less than half their peak- period carrying capacity. This unhappy situation was caused in the mid-1990’s by a breathtakingly short-sighted decision to stop forming four and five-car trains. 

Various reasons are cited for this enormously-consequential mistake, including pressure from the TWU (Muni operator’s union), coupling difficulties, maintenance problems, etc. but the most likely reason is that for reasons unknown, beginning in 1991 the then incoming Breda LRVs were arriving in San Francisco without the ability to couple LRVs together while in revenue service. Having reached the end of their useful life, the Breda’s are now being gradually replaced with new Siemens S200 LRVs, which began arriving in San Francisco in 2017.

In an effort to receive assurance that the Siemens car would at last allow the SFMTA to again begin using its subway effectively, Save Muni (www.savemuni.org), a San Francisco-based transit-advocacy group, sent several requests for information to the SFMTA during last August and September, followed up by a California Public Records Act/San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance request sent on November 5, 2019 asking for:

“1) All records from the past three years related to when the Muni Metro may be able to accommodate longer than two car trains

2) All records from the past three years related to tests of longer than two car trains in the ACTS territory, whether conducted by the MTA or outside contractors.”

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It’s been clear for decades that another way of crossing the Bay between Oakland and San Francisco will be needed when BART runs out of peak-period transbay carrying-capacity. It is now estimated that this capacity limit will be reached before 2030. Thankfully the “Powers” have at last begun their planning. However, given the glacial pace of Bay Area infrastructure development, the needed supplemental system won’t be up and running until 2060 or later. So how, one might ask, do Central Bay Area transit leaders plan to cope during the intervening 30 or more years? If anyone knows the answer to this rather important question, he or she is keeping mum on the subject.

Here are a few observations designed to speed things up:

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