Muni Forward

Two-way access on the east end of McAllister Street has been restored for Muni buses, bicycles, and commercial vehicles, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) announced last week.

The J-Church has emerged as the top candidate for Muni to test all-door boarding as a way to speed up service on its busiest and least reliable lines. San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) Transit Director John Haley said today that it is being evaluated for a pilot program that could lead to a system-wide change in boarding policy.

Just about any of the roughly 20,000 regular Muni riders who take the 6 or 71 lines every day can tell you their bus can come to a crawl as they make the turns at Laguna Street. Decades ago, the easternmost block of Haight Street was turned into a one-way street in the opposite direction, forcing inbound buses onto a notoriously slow and unnecessary detour, often called the "dog leg".

Riders of the J-Church know all too well what it's like to wait for a packed peak-hour train without any guarantee they'll be able to squeeze on board. If you look at the data, though, the SFMTA says the picture isn't as bad as it's been made out to be. Still, two city supervisors aren't buying it.

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, in an interview with Streetsblog this week, pledged to make the Transit Effectiveness Project (TEP) implementation his number one Muni priority. That'll be no easy task, however. More than three years after the SFMTA Board unanimously approved a plan to give Muni its first major revamp in 20 years, the TEP -- at a cost of over $3 million so far -- remains just another plan collecting dust.

It wasn't without grumbling, but commuters this morning made it through the biggest changes to Muni's bus network in over 30 years, and the MTA wasn't sent scrambling to fix any huge problems.

This Saturday will bring wide-ranging changes to Muni, a broad reorganization of the city's transit system that MTA Executive Director Nat Ford called the most complex service changes in a generation. But while this round of changes will be virtually net-neutral in terms of overall service and revenue, Ford said the MTA's looming $19 million mid-year budget deficit will force the agency to consider much deeper future service cuts.

The MTA today announced the specific Muni service changes it will make on December 5 as part of its efforts to close a $129 million budget gap. Half of Muni's bus routes and one of its rail routes are affected, with changes including discontinued or shortened routes and altered service hours and frequencies. To soften the impact, several routes will get increased service. Six routes will be discontinued altogether: the 4-Sutter, 7-Haight, 20-Columbus, 26-Valencia, 53-Southern Heights, and 89-Laguna Honda.

After two MTA board meetings filled with passionate though civil debate over the alignment of the shortened 2-Clement, the MTA has finally settled on a terminus for the line. Instead of the two options that brought out well-organized opposition at previous meetings, 2-Clement buses will layover at an existing bus stop on the south side of Clement Street, just west of 14th Avenue - but only for six months. After that, the MTA will review the terminus location, and hopes to replace the line with an electric trolley bus that would run on California Street instead, taking advantage of existing overhead wires on Sutter, Presidio, and California Streets.