Jessica Kariisa [00:02:42] This isn’t a new problem. We’ve been talking about it for a while, but it feels like the headlines are becoming more and more dire, You know, and it seems like time is running out to figure out a solution. Why is it that we’re sort of, you know, ramping up to to catastrophe?
Dan Brekke [00:02:58] People have a term for it. They call it the fiscal cliff. MUNI has gotten huge, huge, huge amounts of money from the federal government and lesser extent the state government to keep operations rolling. And we’re coming to the end of that. It’s spending the last of those emergency funds that came from Washington and Sacramento. It’s a very real thing.
Jessica Kariisa [00:03:26] So now we’re at a point where SFMTA, the agency that runs MUNI, is talking about huge cuts to service. And at a meeting last Wednesday for the Funding Working Group, they unveiled some of these cuts. Could you talk about what they said, what these possible scenarios are?
Dan Brekke [00:03:49] Well, you know, I’ll qualify it the same way that Jeff Tumlin, the head of the SFMMTA, did.
Jeff Tumlin [00:03:56] So I just want to remind all of you that the goal of this entire effort is to avoid any service cuts.
Dan Brekke [00:04:03] He said, look, these are not our plans. This is not a strategy we want to follow. This is what we want to avoid.
Jeff Tumlin [00:04:12] In order to do that. We need to have a real conversation about just how dire our situation is and what is at stake.
Dan Brekke [00:04:26] They talked about cutting most of the lesser used lines on MUNI. That could be between 25 and 30 bus lines. They talked about running service much less frequently on both MUNI’s bus lines and trains. And they talked about things like canceling the normal evening service and instituting something that’s kind of a skeletal overnight service called the owl service, extending the hours of that. And there is more on the list, too. So, for instance, MUNI has ferry subsidies in place for youth and lower income people and seniors like myself. And those might be cut. And they talked about heartbreakingly, basically mothballing the cable cars and the historic streetcar line that runs down Market Street.
Jessica Kariisa [00:05:22] I mean, it’s really hard to imagine San Francisco without cable cars. You know, it’s just such an iconic part of the city’s image.
Dan Brekke [00:05:31] It is, absolutely. Have you ridden them?
Jessica Kariisa [00:05:33] I have. As a tourist, when I visit San Francisco, I don’t know. 20 years ago? Yeah.
Dan Brekke [00:05:39] Yeah. When you get to the cable car, people, you know, that tugs at people’s heartstrings a little bit. It’s a kind of a an icon of San Francisco. But it also gets people to pay attention. It’s an expensive thing to run. And they could save a substantial money by just not running it.
Jessica Kariisa [00:05:58] I mean, can we talk about the impact that some of these cuts would have? I mean. Yeah. Riders, of course. But I mean, I imagine transit workers, you know, if people lose access to certain lines, does that mean they have to drive and Bay Area traffic gets worse? I mean, do we have a sense of what that could look like?
Dan Brekke [00:06:17] Well, you know, MUNI says that 38% of its ridership qualifies as low income. 70% are people of color. And when they went through this exercise of talking about these various cuts,they might do, they estimated the number of people in the city, you know city of 800,000 plus, who would be affected. And the conclusion I got after going through the slides was basically, everybody’s going to be affected.
Julie Kirschbaum [00:06:46] Degrading the system at the scale that I’m going to be presenting today puts us into a vicious cycle.
Dan Brekke [00:06:54] One of the people who spoke during this funding group meeting was Julie Kirschbaum. She’s the director of transportation for the SFMTA. She’s the one who oversees all the MUNI street operations.
Julie Kirschbaum [00:07:07] The service is crowded and people can’t get on it. Then the people that have choices, they start driving. When they start driving, they create congestion, which not only means we’re not getting their fair revenue, but we’re also paying our way out of the slower service.
Dan Brekke [00:07:31] SFMMTA officials are saying this is sort of a watershed moment if they need to make these cuts. For one reason, it will take a long time to reverse any cuts they make. But they also see that they just may be alienating the very people that they’re dedicated to serve.
Julie Kirschbaum [00:07:49] We’re trying to, if at all possible, avoid this kind of interrelated, vicious cycle of of consequences. Being able to count on your muni trip every day is critical to build ridership.
Jessica Kariisa [00:08:15] So these are the worst case scenarios, right? They’re not in effect yet. What are the steps in between before, you know, they could be in effect? Before this would actually happen.
Dan Brekke [00:08:37] Right. The city put together this MUNI funding working group to sort of assess the situation at Muni and SFMTA and come up with ideas both to make the agency more efficient and to think about things that might be done to raise more money. So we’re not at the end of that process yet. So the next step for the MUNI working group is they’re going to start talking about, okay, where could we raise money? What what sorts of steps could we do? They’re supposed to deliver a report to the SFMTA board of directors early next year, and then it’ll be up to the SFMTA board to move ahead with whatever recommendations there are.
I mean, I have the sense, without seeing anything on paper yet, that it’s going to be a very complex solution and that it will involve ballot measures. It could involve a tax measure just in San Francisco. It could involve a tax measure that will be a regional tax measure. And one of the things that Jeff Tomlin was saying last week is whatever we come up with has to be something that will not only help us avoid all these terrible cuts I’m talking about, but it’s something that has to be able to win at some point. This is going to rely on the voters supporting whatever the city and the agency put before them.
Jessica Kariisa [00:10:14] And San Francisco voters were actually asked this November to pass a tax to help muni called Prop L. It passed, but it also didn’t. Can you explain Prop L and what happened to it?
Dan Brekke [00:10:29] So Proposition L was a really interesting effort by a bunch of real dyed in the wool transit activists here in the city to give MUNI sort of a helping hand. And their idea was to impose a new tax on Uber, Lyft and Waymo that would go to transit operations at MUNI. The tax wasn’t something that was going to raise a lot of money, right? It was going to be about $25 million a year in the context of a $1.4 billion budget. But MUNI has to operate very close to the bone right now. And we’re in a situation where $25 million would actually make a difference maybe in avoiding some service cuts that could be coming.
What happened was at the same time there was a much farther reaching tax measure called Proposition M, which was basically reforming the city’s business taxes. And there was a provision in Proposition M that any conflicting tax measure would have to get more votes than Proposition M to take effect. So the voters got their say. Proposition M was boosted by a pretty good yes on M campaign and it got 70% of the vote. That was a really high bar for Proposition L to meet and in the end it only got about 57% of the vote. So it passed and as you said, it failed at the same time. So it won’t be taking effect.
Jessica Kariisa [00:12:04] Can you talk about the reaction from transit activists to to that happening to the measure they put on — passing but then not passing in the end?
Dan Brekke [00:12:14] Yeah, I think they were very disappointed, but they were also hopeful.
Cyrus Hall [00:12:18] I think 58% or 57%, whatever we end up at is a really great result for that.
Dan Brekke [00:12:25] One of the people I talked to was Cyrus Hall. He was an organizer for Prop L, and of course he was disappointed by the result. But he also saw a real silver lining to what happened.
Cyrus Hall [00:12:38] You know, this is a measure that passed with a majority of the vote in every single district of the city except D2, really showing that, you know, the city as a whole supports transit.
Jessica Kariisa [00:12:51] So, Dan, what is the solution here? What what else can be done to save transit in the Bay Area? How do we save MUNI?
Dan Brekke [00:13:02] You know, the solution is sort of an all of the above kind of thing. The city is going to have to find resources that are already out there. Right. For instance, it has all these, you know, all this parking space throughout the city that actually it lets go for a pretty low price. It’s going to have to put prices on things like that. You know, there will be resistance to that, but that’s one of the real potential solutions. There may have to be some new city tax, right? And there’s going to have to be a regional tax as well. You’re going to start to see very definite ideas about what these solutions will look like within the next couple of months. Some of this stuff is going to go before the state legislature. Some of it will go before the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the SFMTA board. But, you know, we’re going to get a very clear sense about what this sort of package of solutions is. And it’s going to have to be a package.
Jessica Kariisa [00:14:08] What about federal help? I mean, we’re facing another Trump presidency. Are federal subsidies an option here?
Dan Brekke [00:14:17] I mean, that’s an excellent question. And it’s true that Bay Area transit would have been completely devastated without the federal government, right. The reason we have what looks like normal transit operations in the Bay Area and much of the rest of the country is because the federal government stepped in with bailouts to keep everything running. So that money is running out. And with a change in administration, I think most people feel like that’s over. There’s no appetite in Congress, which is now Republican controlled, and it’s very unlikely that the President-elect is interested in that either.
Jessica Kariisa [00:15:02] Do you have a sense of how the public feels about public transit right now? I mean, is this just an awareness issue or do you think that the Bay Area maybe has changed and public transit is less of a priority than it used to be?
