Rescue Muni

The Supervisors yesterday declined to reject the MTA budget after a deal was struck with MTA director Nat Ford to make $10 million in budget cuts, including only $2.8 million in cuts to work orders (out of $63 million – read down to 6:41 PM in SF Appeal’s live blog) to other city departments, in an attempt to avoid further cuts in service. Among the cuts was a decision to delay hiring of parking control officers and fare inspectors, which is likely to cause more service delays and could reduce parking revenue.

No details yet on which work orders will be reduced, though riders who have recently seen cops on the buses should now expect them to disappear, now that SFPD is keeping the majority (or all?) of its inflated allocation and isn’t making a show of cooperating with the MTA. There does not appear to have been a decision to move control of the traffic division to MTA, as was previously proposed.

Fares will still go up as scheduled, except for Lifeline Pass users.

Update: The Budget Committee voted to send the motion to reject the budget back to the full board. At the moment the motion doesn’t have the votes, so the budget is likely to stand.

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.

Today’s Chronicle reports that Muni wrote just over 10,000 fare evasion tickets last quarter, for a total of over 26,000 for the year. It’s still a drop in the bucket compared with the total amount of fare evasion, but every little bit counts – particularly because fare enforcement on the buses allows legal rear door boarding, which speeds up service.

Reminder: Sign up for Translink to speed up your own fare payment – and avoid a ticket!

From our friend Dave Snyder at SPUR:

Today (Thursday) at 4:00 p.m. the Board of Supervisors Budget & Finance Committee is hearing the MTA Budget. This budget is good for transit riders, but it’s run into some political difficulties. We need your help to get the necessary votes to avoid a rejection of this budget by the Board of Supervisors. (It requires seven votes to reject the budget; therefore, we need five to support it.)
Read the rest of this entry »

The SFMTA offers convenient online sales of the Fast Pass as well as parking cards (to pay those increasing meter fees and avoid nasty tickets), but inexplicably limits Fast Pass sales to just twelve days per month. So we thought we’d post a quick reminder that you can now (as of April 10) order your pass online, and it will be mailed to you.

Would you like monthly reminders, at least until the MTA offers auto-renewal? If so, comment below, we can post a comment like this every month.