Muni

If you're wondering why Mayor Gavin Newsom supports a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency two-year budget that continues major Muni service reductions, you just might find your answer in the Mayor's weekly YouTube update.

Today is the first workday test of the Muni system after a ten percent overall reduction in service frequency went into effect on Saturday. The scene on this rainy Monday didn't look all that different from a typical Muni commute: the buses were crowded and the waits were occasionally longer than they should be, but for the most part, people made it to their destination -- if not on time.

In his magnum opus, The High Cost of Free Parking, UCLA Professor Donald Shoup argues that city parking managers will build merchant support for extending parking meter hours and pricing them according to demand if they return some or all of the extra revenue to the merchant corridors where it was collected.

In one of the broadest public organizing efforts around Muni in the past year, speakers from a range of groups -- as well as several members of the Board of Supervisors -- called today for the rejection of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency's (SFMTA) two-year budget, which includes 10 percent cuts to Muni service.

After months of non-stop bad news, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), which runs Muni, announced something positive for a change: Fare evasion is way down from a year ago.

Muni is paying many city agencies for their services without written agreements detailing just what the transit agency should be getting and for how much, according to an audit [PDF] released by the City Controller's office today.

In just over a week, Muni will cut bus frequencies across the system by perhaps the greatest amount in its history. Roughly 313,000 service hours will be cut out of the schedule [PDF], leaving riders to wait an average of 10 percent longer for buses and trains. Depending on the line and the time of day, riders could see increased waits of one to ten minutes for each bus, with fifteen extra minutes between some overnight bus lines.

There's been a lot of attention lately on how much the Mayor's office controls the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency's (SFMTA) budget process. The Mayor makes all seven SFMTA Board appointments, generally with an expectation of complete loyalty, ensuring that it's the Mayor who ultimately calls the shots behind the scenes.

With the help of the Board of Supervisors acting as the San Francisco County Transportation Authority (TA) Board, Muni got a step closer today to finishing out fiscal year 2010 in the black, but there are major strings attached. In return for sending $7 million to the city's transit agency, the supervisors expect Muni to reduce a planned 10-percent service cut by half.