SF Muni Is in Dire Need of Funding. Without It, Cuts Could Be ‘Devastating’

San Franciscans got a shocking look this week at what their city’s much-celebrated but financially fragile transit system might be reduced to if city leaders fail to come up with a workable plan to raise more funding.

Municipal Transportation Agency leaders unveiled a short but sobering list of possible cuts during a Wednesday meeting of a special panel set up this year to come up with a Muni rescue plan.

The service reductions that the SFMTA said could be needed to help reduce future annual deficits topping $300 million include reducing the frequency of many busy bus and train lines, ending service on bus routes with the lowest ridership and mothballing the city’s historic cable cars and trolleys.

That presentation came just days after what should have been good news for the Bay Area’s busiest transit system: Proposition L, a community-led ballot measure that would have raised about $25 million a year through a new tax on ride-hailing services, won 57% approval. However, to take effect, the measure would have had to outpoll another successful tax measure, Proposition M, which won a 70% “yes” vote.

Although revenue from Proposition L would not have been enough to make or break Muni’s $1.4 billion annual budget, funds would have been earmarked for transit operations — the day-to-day work of getting service on the street for its half-million weekday passengers.

In Muni’s current precarious state, that $25 million would make a difference.

SFMTA Executive Director Jeff Tumlin told the Muni Funding Working Group on Wednesday that his goal in outlining the draconian service-reduction scenarios is to show the importance of coming up with a politically viable revenue solution that can get on the ballot in 2026.

His ultimate goal is to avoid service cuts and continue to rebuild and improve Muni’s service, which was scaled back during the pandemic.

“But in order to do that, we need to have a real conversation about just how dire our situation is and what is at stake so that one, we can come to agreement on new revenue, and two, we can win,” Tumlin said.

Muni’s money-saving saving scenarios include:

• Suspending service on lower-utilized routes: This would eliminate 20 routes serving about 50,000 riders. Net savings: $63 million.
• Reducing service frequency by as much as 50%: Would affect the system’s busiest routes, including the 14/14R-Mission and 38/38R-Geary, and all six Muni Metro lines. Net savings: $71 million.
• Suspending regular bus and train service at 9 p.m. each night and replace with less frequent Owl Service. It would affect as many as 28 routes. Net savings: $14 million.
• Suspending cable car and historic streetcar service: Net savings: $33 million.

The agency said it could save millions more by reducing fare subsidies for youth, seniors, lower-income residents and people with disabilities.

Those steps, which would likely gut Muni’s service and lead to significant ridership losses, would save about $200 million a year, which is not nearly enough to close the agency’s future funding gap fully. The reductions would also compromise Muni’s efforts to equitably serve a ridership that’s 38% low-income and 70% people of color.

Julie Kirschbaum, SFMTA’s director of transit, said service cuts of the magnitude the agency presented would have deep, long-lasting effects beyond the loss of daily service.

“This would dramatically slow down the actual and perceived recovery of San Francisco” from its pandemic-era economic troubles, she said. “Customer satisfaction will take a devastating hit, and regaining that public trust will take decades.”

This week, the SFMTA also announced it has slowed down hiring of bus and train operators because of its tight budget. That hiring slowdown, in turn, has prompted Muni to plan what it’s calling “incremental” service reductions beginning in February.

However, service suspension on the scale needed to save $200 million a year, Kirschbaum said, would be “very difficult to reverse.”

“There’s nothing to say that if we temporarily suspended a route, we couldn’t add it back,” she said. “But even just a six-month slowdown in operator hiring takes 18 months to recover. … Stopping something like the cable car, there’s no telling what the cost would be to restart it.”

The prospect of devastating service cuts was the big motivator for a grass-roots group of transit activists to put together Proposition L, which proposed a gross-receipts tax on ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft. The object, communicated in the campaign’s “Fund the Bus!” title, was simple: to raise money to help Muni avoid service reductions.

The campaign needed 50% plus one vote to win, but it faced a much steeper challenge: Proposition M, a suite of tax reforms that included a provision requiring any “conflicting” proposal to get more votes to take effect. Proposition L was deemed a conflicting measure. Though it easily won citywide and ran up huge majorities in transit-dependent neighborhoods like the Mission, it fell far short of Proposition M’s level of approval. Thus, it won, and it lost.

Proposition L organizer Cyrus Hall said in an interview that Proposition M’s “poison pill” provision was all but impossible to overcome. An opposition campaign in which Uber spent more than $1 million to shoot down the measure made things even tougher, Hall said.

“I think 58% or 57%, whatever we end up, that is a really great result,” he said. “It shows that a simple pro-transit, positive message is resilient to that sort of huge money spending from corporations.”