Semi-retired history buff Richard Petersen ^[3] decried the proposal for metered parking on Sundays. "It's shutting down all the small businesses in the city," he stated emphatically.

Other attendees fired back, explaining that merchants tend to favor Sunday metering because it results in greater turnover. When New York City stopped Sunday metering, observed one metering advocate, "merchants freaked out. It was the end of new customers on Sunday."

After several minutes of debate, consensus on the topic appeared to coalesce around supporting occupancy- ^[4]based pricing.

The SFTRU began to take shape in mid-February, when Dave Snyder -- a Streetsblog contributor, former Transportation Policy Director at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR ^[5]), and former Executive Director of the San Francisco Bike Coalition (SFBC ^[6]) -- heeded encouragement from his colleagues to form a transit rider advocacy group.

To this point, Snyder wrote the SFTRU mission statement on the wall at the start of the meeting ("to promote excellent and growing public transit in San Francisco") and invited feedback. Before long, proposed modifications included replacing "excellent" with "efficient," adding "affordable" and "safe," and a statement of support for eliminating fares on Muni altogether.

The conversation broadened even further on the topic of campaigns that SFTRU might carry out. Among the suggestions:

• A rider-education campaign about moving all the way to the back of the bus
• Pressuring Muni to roll out more comprehensive 511 information
• Examining accusations of discriminatory enforcement of proof-of-payment
• Stopping the Central Subway project
  
• Advocating for appointments to the SFMTA Board
• Changing the loud squeal when the subway doors are held open
  

Refining the SFTRU's scope will require further meetings, further input from the public, and a dedicated group of volunteers. "We need a web presence," Snyder reported, "we need help on Facebook pages, database development, and event coordination." He encouraged anyone interested in contributing to contact him at dsnyder@sftru.org ^[7], or to attend next Thursday's meeting at 6:30 p.m. The location for that meeting is yet to be determined, but will be announced soon to members of the SFTRU mailing list ^[8].

At the end of the two-hour meeting, it was clear that much work remained to be done. Gesturing to the proposed list of campaigns, one attendee said that the group already had enough material for a year's worth of meetings about Muni.