SF Muni Is Struggling. To Help, This Driver Wants You to Ride the Bus — and Say Thanks

Many San Francisco drivers are familiar with the precipitous paved cliffs that double as the city’s roads. In a 40-foot-long vehicle that holds dozens of passengers, this hilly terrain is all the more difficult.

On certain Muni lines like the 37 Corbett, the road is so narrow that the mirrors of the bus pass over the mirrors of parked cars on either side.

“It’s in its own league. Turning the wheel is the least of it,” said Mc Allen, a transit operator for Muni, as he prepared to start a recent shift driving the 44 O’Shaughnessy in the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood.

As the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency faces a severe budget deficit and the possibility of service cuts to several lines, Allen is on a mission to highlight his job and raise awareness of the importance of public transit. He wants people to make a point of riding Muni on Tuesday, with a goal to increase ridership by 10%.

What Allen calls San Francisco Transit Operator Day comes the same day that the SFMTA board will discuss those proposed cuts.

He got the idea after he heard of a fellow transit operator who had never received a commendation, a kind of formal compliment to operators that members of the public can submit to SFMTA. Allen said his colleague had 14 years of service.

“​​The idea is one big day for Muni operators to celebrate transit in San Francisco and encourage people to recognize our efforts and our labor,” Allen said.

He’s also asking members of the public to submit a total of 500 commendations to drivers and added that the day is not just about recognizing the operators but also the car cleaners, mechanics, schedulers, dispatchers, station agents and other people who help make Muni run.

San Francisco Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, meanwhile, has introduced a resolution to officially mark March 18 as Transit Operator Day, which the board will vote on that day. (For years, SFMTA has held its own Transit Operator Appreciation Day for staff on March 18.)

“I think resolutions have an importance of raising awareness for our ‘invisible warriors’ in the city,” Mahmood said. “ Unless the public has awareness of the important role that the Muni operators have, they wouldn’t know that they’re an important part of the line item of the budget that we need to be advocating for.”

At Tuesday’s meeting, the SFMTA board will consider reduced service on the 5 Fulton, 9 San Bruno and 31 Balboa lines — and to combine the 21 Hayes and the 6 Haight-Parnassus lines.

According to SFMTA, the cuts are needed to rein in an approximately $50 million budget deficit for fiscal year 2025–26, which is set to begin in July — due to lower-than-expected transit and parking revenue and lower-than-expected operating transfers from the city’s general fund.

SFMTA officials have said these service reductions of about 4% will save the agency $15 million and that it plans to make up the remainder of next fiscal year’s deficit through improvements to fare compliance and its parking program.

Regardless, the deficit is set to balloon to over $300 million in fiscal year 2026–27, when one-time state and federal funding related to the COVID-19 pandemic is exhausted.

The reductions are a pared-down version of service cuts that SFMTA staff proposed earlier. Still, transit advocates like Jaime Viloria, the outreach and organizing manager for the nonprofit transit advocacy group San Francisco Transit Riders, said the agency should consider dipping into its financial reserves before cutting service.

“Everybody loves Muni, but I feel like it’s not being shown a lot of love fiscally,” he said.

Viloria is worried that with SFMTA’s budget deficit set to grow in the future, any cuts to service made now could become permanent.

“If people aren’t using transit, then you don’t have revenue from those fares, and then you won’t have the ridership to justify running those lines,” Viloria said. “And it just spirals out of control.”

San Francisco Transit Riders is among the groups organizing a protest against service cuts outside San Francisco City Hall on Tuesday.

Mahmood said he also advocated for SFMTA to dip into its reserves to tame the deficit, rather than reduce service.

For Allen, it’s just a coincidence that his Transit Operator Appreciation Day falls on the same day SFMTA’s board is expected to discuss the ongoing financial challenges.

He said service reductions would be “enormously impactful” to operators, meaning fewer buses on the road would strain operators.

“Even if you only get around in San Francisco by car, public transit is enormously valuable to you because it’s what keeps congestion in check,” Allen said. “Our street network can’t work if public transit is not there serving the hundreds of thousands of San Franciscans every day, and so whether you ride Muni or not, you benefit from it.”