To our members – apologies if you have had difficulty joining Rescue Muni or renewing your membership recently. We have now fixed a problem with our payment processor and the “Join Us” page is now working properly again. Thanks for your patience!
The Culture Bus, a 1 year project that will cost Muni $1.6 million, has only 255 weekday riders, according to the Chronicle. Known as the 74X-CultureBus, the line is intended to bring tourists and Muni regulars from downtown to the car-congested Academy of Sciences building that recently opened in Golden Gate Park. The buses aren’t run like the rest of the fleet, the coaches are extra clean and the drivers have gone through additional customer service training, something that the rest of the Muni system could use more of.
Service on the line has since been cut from 20 minutes to once an hour according to the article, but Rescue Muni has taken the position that this line should be terminated if it is not profitable within one month, especially in light of the city, state, and federal budget constraints.
Improved fare enforcement and more people deciding to save money and stress by taking transit has boosted Muni’s bottom line, with cable cars raising the biggest slice, bringing in a whopping $14.5M, or 21% more over the last 6 months. Muni could really use the money too, with a projected $90M shortfall over the next 18 months.
Rescue Muni is monitoring the budget situation and will publish how the numbers will add up to in a future posting.
Where should Congress spend the proposed stimulus package? A national coalition called Transportation for America (mainly unions, environmental organizations, and transit advocates) is lobbying for increased spending on mass transit, and not just more highways. Lots of mass transit projects nationwide can be considered “shovel ready,” the buzzword du jour for economic stimulus.
Locally, the SF Bike Coalition and SPUR are members. Want to get involved? Sign up here!
The Chronicle editorializes against congestion pricing today, calling the plan “half-baked” despite ample experience elsequere in the world (London, Singapore, Stockholm) that congestion pricing reduces traffic and speeds up mass transit.
The Chronicle even cites increased transit usage as a disadvantage of the plan! To quote: “[T]he second intended effect – nudging drivers into public transit – may further burden overtaxed systems such as BART and Muni, which can be inconvenient, unreliable and jammed.” But that’s the whole point – to get discretionary drivers to switch to mass transit, and at the same time reduce delays that cause that mass transit to run slowly. By speeding up service, San Francisco would be able to provide more service for the same money, surely a high priority in these difficult economic times.
Rescue Muni continues to support some form of congestion pricing in downtown SF. We hope the Supervisors will take seriously the concerns raised about this proposal – but not back down from a proven way to improve service for Muni’s 700,000 daily riders AND SF’s motorists, who will experience reduced traffic when they do choose to drive.