An Exit Interview with SF Transit Director Jeff Tumlin
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From KQED. From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. There's big change afoot in San Francisco's politics and governance. One big part of that change will be that SFMTA's leader during the pandemic, Jeffrey Tumlin, has stepped down from his post.

Tumlin was, at times, a lightning rod for controversies about pedestrian safety, bike lanes, closing streets to car traffic and transit service. But Muni ridership has recovered better than BART by far. And though the agency faces a gnarly fiscal cliff in the next couple years, he managed Muni through a brutal period for public transportation in every city. He'll join us to talk about his tenure and the future of transit in San Francisco. It's all coming up next after this news.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Our guest this morning is Jeff Tumlin, the just-retired head of SFMTA, known to you and me usually as Muni. Before Tumlin took the job, he'd worked in urban transportation issues for decades. He'd written books, given lectures, and he had big plans to improve Muni's service and change the culture of the organization.

At a time when San Francisco transit use was booming, downtown was packed, and it felt like the city was bursting at the seams. Then a few months after that, the pandemic hit, and we're going to find out what did happen. First, let's welcome in Jeff Tomlin. Welcome. Thank you. So good to be here.

I want to start with envisioning the sort of alternate reality in which the pandemic did not happen. The virus never mutates. It gets snuffed out in Wuhan. Like it just it doesn't the pandemic doesn't happen. What would you have done at SFMTA? Well, it's it's unimaginable. I mean, the pandemic happened three months into the job. We were in lockdown.

And everything changed. And the pandemic was like an accelerant. All of the broken bureaucratic rules were suspended. And we knew that there was no way to maintain any of the status quo. So every single thing that we did had to be completely reinvented. And so it's very difficult to imagine what if that sort of peak boom economy had just continued?

And it's important- Because was SFMTA on a sustainable trajectory? Oh, no. No, no, no. So I inherited a $50 million annual structural deficit. So in government agencies, your cost of delivering service rises with the cost of living, but your revenue rises at best with inflation. So every year, the gap grows a little bit wider and your services degrade.

And so one of the things that I wanted to solve for was a $50 million structural deficit. And when I started at the peak of the boom economy, now we have about a $250 million structural deficit that needs to be closed within the next two years. I mean, how is any – if what you're saying is right, like how is any government service still running that –

Well, I mean, look at government services. We're really struggling in most government services, particularly here in California. And part of that is the extraordinarily high cost of living. And the other part of it is the tax structure, like with Prop 13, where property taxes are declining every year relative to inflation, while our expenses grow largely because of the extraordinarily high cost of living. So when the shutdowns first began...

Did you imagine it could possibly get as bad as it did for as long as it was ridership specifically? Well, yes. I think there were many people who thought, oh, yeah, we're just going to do lockdown for two weeks and then we'll go back to pre-COVID normal. And I had...

watched enough bad sci-fi movies to know that that was not going to be the case. Like this was the zombie apocalypse and the impact was going to be long lasting. Um, I didn't realize quite what all the impacts were going to be, but at Muni we hunkered down. I knew that we needed to dramatically reduce spending, completely restructure the entire transportation system and protect the staff for the long haul. Hmm.

And what did that end up entailing? Well, so there was the Friday of the first week of lockdown and people were terrified. You know, my counterparts at other cities like New York or New Orleans or Detroit were literally burying dozens of their staff as a result of COVID.

And we took a strong stance to protect the staff, which meant that at any given day, a third of the agency would be in quarantine, which meant that there was no way I can deliver anything approaching reasonable muni surface. So we realized that we needed to completely redo everything. And then on that Friday, our

Our core team got together and we worked all weekend long to completely strip Muni back to its barest essentials, going from 80-odd transit lines to a dozen, focused on serving the essential institutions like the hospitals and the main neighborhood retail centers. That decision saved us. Yeah.

What would have happened, do you think, if we hadn't? Well, we would have delivered terrible service. I mean, you know, remember pre-COVID, the peak of a boom economy. And, you know, the subway was incredibly unreliable. And, you know, buses on Mission Street that were supposed to run every five minutes, instead you would get six buses all bunched together every half hour.

And with social distancing and the need for reliability, we couldn't deliver on that. And so we took a very, very hard stance to focus on making Muni fast, frequent, safe, clean, and reliable.

So you come into the agency with the goal of big culture change. And then you're thrown this almost unmanageable curveball of the pandemic. Did that, you said it accelerated things at the agency. Did it accelerate the kind of culture change that you were hoping to make? Absolutely. I think the trauma of COVID accelerated culture change in an extraordinarily positive way.

One of the things that we discover, you know, with the work from home orders and the quarantine orders, I had no tool for making sure that people showed up for their jobs. The only reason people were showing up for their jobs and literally putting their lives on the line was because of the meaningfulness of our work.

One of the things that's long been clear in a public transportation agency is that our work is deeply meaningful. The most vulnerable people of San Francisco rely on us every single day, and people are proud of that. And I realized that was the only management tool that I had.

And so the whole executive team spent those months of early COVID out there in the field talking to people about the meaningfulness of the work, telling them about the latest science about how to protect themselves, telling stories of people whose lives we saved as a result of connecting them to critical medical services. And that meaningfulness...

has helped to change the morale and the culture of the agency in ways that I think will be long-lasting. And in fact, we're already there part of the agency. Like it wasn't something that I created. It was more something that had been there and had been suppressed a bit. And we simply allowed our workforce to be their best selves. Yeah.

What about in some of the more sort of nitty-gritty aspects of this, like the way that SFMTA went around doing procurement of things? Well, when all the rules are broken or- Suspended. Suspended. Irrelevant, basically. Yeah. I think we were able to demonstrate the ability of government to get stuff done when some of the

Well-intended but very cumbersome rules get suspended. So... What would be an example of one of those rules? Well, so...

I mean, there are so many ways in which we make buying things very challenging, largely around preventing corruption. So San Francisco, long history of corruption. You don't want to just buy things from your friends. You want to make sure that there is a bidding process and that, you know, small local businesses and minority owned businesses can compete fairly.

But the rules then become incredibly complex. So we were able, I think, to streamline a lot of those rules. And one of, I think, the ways in which we learned from some of our past mistakes might have been on the El Terrival project, major infrastructure renewal project.

Complete replacement of water and sewer and power, the pavement, the train tracks. Incredibly disruptive project. But having learned from the challenges that we faced on a comparable project like Van Ness, we were able to change the procurement rules in order to not only deliver a better project, but to also deliver that project on time and on budget. What were the rule changes that actually enabled that, though?

Well, so a lot of the world of procurement is around how you think about risk. And so if a government agency wants to delegate 100% of all risk onto the private sector, the government agency is going to pay a lot more for a contractor to come do that work. Instead, we have been trying to figure out how to

create partnerships with the private sector where we distribute risk effectively. And then as we learn,

We hone the details as we go along. And does that mean just in practice that you say, okay, we'll pay you X amount of dollars, but it's much more than it seems like it should cost because the cost could spiral out of control? That would be the old way of doing it. And the new way of doing it is to essentially have check-in points, basically, which you are

are able to renegotiate or like how to say so there's many different ways of structuring depending upon how much you're delegating risk and decision making to the private sector so in some cases you basically say all right we need this street rebuilt and private sector you go figure it out and we'll write you a single check in other cases we uh

at the opposite extreme, do all the detailed engineering work ourselves and then have the private sector go build it. Where we find the sweet spot is somewhere in between. And particularly anytime you open up the ground,

to rebuild underground infrastructure in a city where that infrastructure is 150 years old, none of it is mapped. You don't really actually know where any of it is. And there may be 30 defunct telecommunications companies who have cable down there. You don't know which of those cables is actually critical to some national defense infrastructure and which of it is a cable TV company that hasn't existed in 30 years. Mm-hmm.

Do you just unplug them and then see what happens? I assume that's not the way you manage risk.

We are talking about the future of transit in San Francisco, how the transit agency functions, and how Jeff Tumlin, who recently stepped down as director of the agency, wanted it to run. Of course, we want to hear from you in this. What questions do you have about Tumlin's tenure? What do you want from Muni? What's a way that you think transit has gotten better or worse since the pandemic? Yeah.

You can give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786. You can email us, of course, your questions or your comments about Tomlin's tenure to forum at kqed.org.

On social media, Blue Sky, Instagram. Of course, we're KQED Forum. Other places, too, which shall remain unnamed. And we've got the Discord community as well, which you can find. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for more with Jeff Tomlin right after the break.

Set in Chicago during Prohibition, Some Like It Hot tells the story of two musicians forced to flee the Windy City after witnessing a mob hit. Featuring Tony-winning choreography and an electrifying score, Some Like It Hot plays the Orpheum Theatre for three weeks only, January 7th through 26th.

Tickets on sale now at broadwaysf.com. Support for Forum comes from Earthjustice. As a national legal nonprofit, Earthjustice has more than 200 full-time lawyers who fight for a healthy environment. From wielding the power of the law to protect people's health, preserving magnificent places and wildlife, and advancing clean energy to combat climate change, Earthjustice fights in court because the Earth needs a good lawyer.

Learn more about how you can get involved and become a supporter at earthjustice.org. Welcome back to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We're talking with the recently retired director of San Francisco's municipal transportation agency, Jeff Tomlin. We're going to get to a bunch of your calls and comments for the rest of the show. But first, I want to make sure people know the sort of on-the-ground reality of the post-pandemic muni.

Jeff, can you tell me a little bit more about ridership data? If you go look at the dashboards, it's kind of amazing that things have never, haven't come all the way back, that it's been so slow. You look at 2023, you look at 2024, and we're still, things are inching up back towards what we considered normal, but they're not there yet. Well, I mean, bear in mind that...

Muni was designed to serve all of those giant office buildings downtown, and many of those giant office buildings are still sitting empty. What is remarkable about the Muni ridership data is I believe that we have the greatest divergence in ridership data of any system in the country. Like between different modalities or between different... Different lines having different recovery rates. So first of all, go to sfmta.com slash munidata to play with this data of...

Our overall average monthly weekday ridership is about 75% of pre-COVID. But our highest ridership pre-COVID station was Montgomery Station, which is only at 45% of pre-COVID ridership.

Meanwhile, lines like the 22 Fillmore and the 49 Van Ness are well over 120% of pre-COVID ridership on weekdays, and the 22 routinely hits 200% of weekend pre-COVID ridership.

So this divergence is a remarkable pattern. So it's basically like Montgomery looks like BART slash Caltrain and the Fillmore looks more like the AC Transit major lines or something like that. Well, I mean, I don't know that there are other transit agencies in the United States that are experiencing the extraordinarily high ridership that Muni's non-downtown high frequency, high speed lines are getting. Interesting. Interesting. Interesting.

Let's take a first call here before we get into some more issues. Paul in San Francisco, welcome. Yes, I want to preface my remarks. I'm a retired muni operator for 33 years, and I ride buses regularly. And right now there's chaos on muni buses and streetcars. Rules are not enforced. Aisleways are blocked. Doorways are blocked.

people playing radios, and we need a dedicated muni security force. They don't have to be armed, but they can board periodically and keep order. And apparently Mr. Tomlin doesn't seem to consider that a priority. So I asked him that one time, and he dismissed my statements about the chaos of the buses. Maybe he can clarify his position. Thank you. Thanks for your question, Paul. Jeff?

Yes. So we take muni safety and security very seriously. This is the number one concern that we hear from our writers. And it's not really crime. I mean, crime is at a historic low, at least reported crime on muni. But the aberrant social conditions that we see on the streets of San Francisco, those do find their way onto the bus sometimes.

We do have transit fare inspectors who are out there on the buses every day. In fact, we just doubled our transit fare inspectors. About 35 more of them. That's right. Yeah. And we also have transit ambassadors who are out there trained in trying to help support and uphold the public contract.

But, of course, the challenge that we face as an agency is this $275 million structural deficit. And so we always struggle with this notion of should we be hiring more transit operators or more transit security officers? The other thing that I think is important to understand is that most people on Muni actually do pay their fare well.

Yeah, we're going to how big of an issue is fair evasion? So fair compliance pre-COVID was about 88 percent, which was very good for among U.S. operators. Right now, it's about 80 percent fair compliance. What the challenge is, is that the perception of fair evasion is much higher than reality.

On Muni, during COVID, we invented a whole array of new fair media in order to make it easier for people to pay. Most people who get on the bus and don't tag their Clipper card, most of them are in fact paying. They have a transfer. They have a fast pass. They're a kid. They have another kind of monthly pass. They have a wristband going out to outside lands or a ticket to any event at the Chase Arena.

People are paying. They're just not tagging because we have no ability to get them to tag, at least until Clipper modernizes its technology. One more question on this just while we're on it. Mark in San Francisco.

Yeah, hi, Jeff. Thank you so much for your service. I ride Muni all the time, and I really dig it. I think it's running great. I've lived in the city for 25 years. Recently, Muni was made free for young people, and my question is, what would it take to make Muni free for everyone? And specifically, what are we paying to enforce fares? I know we're in a big deficit, but how do we make it free for everyone? Hmm.

So we've looked extensively at what it would take to make muni free for everyone. And the challenge that we face is that we do still get significant net fare revenue, including the cost of enforcing those fares. The other challenge is that when we do polling, voters are not interested in raising their taxes in order to make muni free for everyone.

And so as we try to structure new tax measures for the 2026 ballot, that is not something that polls particularly well. Yeah.

One of the things I also wanted you to clarify for folks about the budget itself is like what has the biggest decline in the budget come from at Muni since the pandemic? Yeah. So the SFMTA is an enterprise organization. It's required to be financially self-sufficient. And if it runs out of money, then that triggers layoffs of our staff. So we do not ever want to run out of money. We cannot borrow money for our operations.

Historically, the revenue sources from UNI have been roughly equal quarters transit fares, parking fees and fines, a fixed set aside from the city general fund, and then a variety of state and federal grants.

For most of the sources of revenue, they have been in long-term decline. The biggest declines that we have faced during COVID have been particularly associated with our parking garages. So those downtown office buildings...

have private parking garages underneath them. The city charges a 25% parking sales tax on private downtown parking. And it also has close to a dozen garages in the kind of greater downtown area. Some of those garages have long been sitting empty, like the Moscone garage,

which was designed in an era when business travelers would fly into SFO and rent a car at SFO to drive to their ophthalmology conference at the Moscone Center. They haven't done that in a long time. It's fascinating how it just shows that the model of the city in which the downtown functioned in this particular way –

Almost every show that you don't necessarily think is going to somehow circle back to downtown being in trouble. There's there's an aspect to it because it just it suffuses so many of the components of the rest of the city. That's not downtown. Indeed. Yeah. Yeah. Let's bring in one line question here. William in San Francisco. Welcome, William.

Thank you, Alex. Hi, Jeff. I want to first just thank you for being a big mentor to the LGBT community. There are a lot of young, queer, transit aficionados that have someone to look up to. And the Buses Do So Much t-shirt has done legions for the community. My question...

and being about the data analysis that you're talking about and uh... the different out the from twenty one hazer two lines that uh... are you know don't have the uh... higher ridership that other lines do but like the seven he has really high ridership

I know that there's a working group that's looking at changes to routes, and I'm curious, has anyone ever looked at merging the 6th and the 21? You'd still be able to serve Hayes Valley with a line that can connect to UCSF and possibly looking at the east end of that line to go to the other UCSF in Mission Bay. And just looking at...

You know, the 35, another example of a line that, you know, folks fought to keep and extend to Glen Park. It hasn't recovered. What are your thoughts? Well, so that's a big question that is being faced by what's called the Muni Funding Working Group. And I would urge you to simply Google Muni Funding Working Group. It's being led by the city controller's office looking at how do we close a $300 million structural deficit?

And to what degree do we need to close that with service cuts or through new revenue? And hopefully the answer will be through new revenue and clear decisions will be made there. But if we do have to

cut service, the other big challenge is to what degree do you cut low frequency, low utilization lines like the 6 or the 35 versus do frequency cuts and capacity cuts to high ridership, high capacity crowded lines like the 38 or the 49. There's not a lot of savings to be gained from

These low frequency, low ridership lines, unfortunately. And while some of them have parallel service within a couple blocks, like the 21, the 21 remains very popular, particularly in the in the tenderloin for people with disabilities. So, you know, there are some very hard tradeoff questions that the city is going to need to face over the next two years. Yeah.

Do you have a position on that now that you're out of the chair of what the right thing to do is? I mean, there's no clear answer. It really comes down to a hard values tradeoff. And it also depends upon the extent of the cuts. If there needs to be massive cuts to the muni service, then...

And I think rolling back the clock on what we did during COVID is a pretty good strategy. And again, we stripped Muni down from 80-odd lines to 12 and then steadily built it back, making hard and clear choices at every step based upon the ridership need

as well as the particular needs of specific communities like the Tenderloin and Chinatown, which have acute, acute transit needs. Let's talk a little bit about bike lanes, everyone's favorite topic. The Valencia Street bike corridor, I can't, I mean, bike lanes across the country sometimes become magnetized in this way, and they have an enormous amount of, an enormous amount of

Yes. Welcome to the San Francisco public process.

So Valencia Street has long been one of the most important bike corridors in all of San Francisco, right? It's the only flat street that connects south into the southern neighborhoods and connects north up to Market Street. It's also one of the most dangerous streets in the city. Pre-COVID, we were seeing a severe injury crash every two weeks along Valencia. Something needed to be done.

And pre-COVID, the MTA built a parking protected bikeway along the curb from Market Street south to 15th. And the plan was to continue that south of 15th all the way down to Cesar Chavez.

Then COVID happened and parklets happened where, you know, merchants along Valencia Street commandeered the parking spaces in front of their business to have outdoor seating for dining, for shopping, for all kinds of things. And there were, I don't know, there were, I think, almost 70 parklets along the middle stretch of Valencia that were right in the way of the bikeway.

And so one of the things that we realized is we still needed to complete the Valencia bikeway. We didn't want to displace all those parklets. And so where else was there space? And the answer to that was in the middle. So we created as an experiment the median running bikeway along Valencia. And indeed, the project ended up achieving all of its goals.

But it also created some unintended consequences. And that is what you do as a public agency who's trying to figure out how to solve problems and take the right level of risk is you try stuff and you tinker with it until you get it right. And in some cases, then you succeed. In other cases, you say, well, all right, let's try something else. So one of the things that we found that we impacted was the Valencia Street brand.

And what's clear from both the Mission Local analysis as well as the Controller's Office analysis, the economic impacts to small businesses along Valencia Street predated the bikeway. So while there is potential correlation, no one has been able to draw a causal line between the overall economy of Valencia Street, a critical and important small business dominated commercial district in San Francisco,

Many of the merchants themselves saw the connection and were basically upset about just the fact that it was confusing.

So the city said or the MTA said, okay, fine. Like what, how do we best achieve two key goals? One, make the streets safer for everyone and two, support the small businesses. So, you know, as usual, we did an incredibly intensive public process, worked with all of the merchants and came up with a different approach, which will extend the curbside parking protected bikeway

south onward towards 23rd Street. And that should be being installed later this winter. I guess we will have future shows there. I have some questions about safety of streets. I mean, we know a lot about how to make streets safer, particularly for people walking and biking. But

But 2024 was a quite dangerous year, you know, quite a big year for traffic fatalities in San Francisco. And at the same time, it seems like we've made some strides towards safer streets, daylighting and many high injury roads, new speed cameras. Are we making progress? Like what's what's going on with the the at least stated goal of getting to, you know, zero pedestrian deaths?

So we absolutely know how to eliminate pedestrian fatalities in San Francisco, and that remains the goal. The challenge, of course, is so much is stacked against all municipal transportation departments. So as we look at the larger trends, streets are safer for pedestrians than they have been in quite a while. I mean, if you look back, say, 15 or 20 years ago, things are better now than they were, but they are not nearly good enough.

We also know that for streets where we invest in quick build traffic safety projects, we typically cut cyclist and pedestrian injuries by about 30%. As we look, though, nationally and globally, we remain shocked. The United States is the only industrialized country in the world where traffic violence is increasing dramatically.

In Los Angeles, pedestrian fatalities have doubled. And a lot of that- Just that the cars themselves, just the size of the vehicles. So partly it is the unique American approach to roadway safety, where we define roadway safety as protecting the occupant of a vehicle. And so we reward car manufacturers who make their vehicles more like tanks. Right.

And that, of course, simply exports the safety problem to more vulnerable road users on the street. We're also facing, of course, a cultural challenge, which is the intensity of the aberrant social behavior that we see everywhere in society. And we also see

on our streets as well. And that is certainly one of the factors that has significantly increased the traffic fatality rate in San Francisco. We see this incredible increase in solo vehicle fixed object crashes, motorists driving 60 miles an hour on city streets and then running into a wall and dying. Or hit and run accidents at incredibly high speed.

We also know that safety-related citations are down 85%. And that's one of the reasons why we're so excited about speed safety cameras being installed later this year. We're talking about transit and the future of transit in San Francisco with Jeff Tomlin, who recently stepped down as director of San Francisco's MTA. We'll be back with more right after the break.

Support for Forum comes from Broadway SF and Some Like It Hot, a new musical direct from Broadway from Tony Award-winning director Casey Nicholaw. Set in Chicago during Prohibition, Some Like It Hot tells the story of two musicians forced to flee the Windy City after witnessing a mob hit. Featuring Tony-winning choreography and an electrifying score, Some Like It Hot plays the Orpheum Theatre for three weeks only, January 7th through 26th.

Tickets on sale now at broadwaysf.com. Support for Forum comes from Earthjustice. As a national legal nonprofit, Earthjustice has more than 200 full-time lawyers who fight for a healthy environment.

From wielding the power of the law to protect people's health, preserving magnificent places and wildlife, and advancing clean energy to combat climate change, Earthjustice fights in court because the Earth needs a good lawyer. Learn more about how you can get involved and become a supporter at earthjustice.org.

Welcome back to Forum. Alexis Madrigal here with Jeff Tumlin, who recently stepped down as director of SFMTA. We're taking your questions about Tumlin's tenure, what you want from uni, what's the way transit has gotten better or worse since the pandemic. You can give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786. You can email forum at kqed.org.

All the social media things, KQED forum, Discord community, of course. Question from a listener who writes in to say, is there any data to show what impact rideshare services have had on both ridership of Muni as well as the budget? Most of the conversation around ridership decreases and budget shortfalls relate to COVID, but I don't hear anything about the impact that these rideshare programs like Lyft, Uber, and Waymo may have on ridership.

That's such an astute question, something we think a lot about. One of the great tensions in the transportation world is the tension between personal convenience and system efficiency. I'm a regular user of Waymo, Uber, and Lyft. I particularly love riding Waymo, but I also know that when I ride Waymo, that I take up more than 10 times as much roadway space as I do when I walk or bike or take Muni.

And so one of the things that the San Francisco County Transportation Authority analyzed several years ago pre-COVID was the impact of Uber and Lyft on downtown congestion. They found that during the last economic boom cycle, about half of the increase in congestion in downtown San Francisco was due to Uber and Lyft.

So Uber and Lyft had both promised, and Lyft in particular, that it was going to solve congestion, that it was going to make the transportation system more efficient, that they were going to fill empty seats and connect people to transit. And none of that turned out to be true. And we're seeing the same thing from Waymo. It is really challenging to make money there.

in the transportation sector. And often the only thing that you have to sell is personal convenience that comes at the efficiency of the overall transportation network. And you don't think that the robo-taxi model will wind up any different? We are seeing no signs that the robo-taxi model ends up any different. In fact, we're seeing signs to the contrary, where when robo-taxis get confused and they come to a

stop in traffic, they're creating significant traffic adjustment problems far more than they're solving. Here is another kind of big picture question for you. It wasn't your project, but you had to see it through the central subway.

Do you think it was a mistake? Well, I would say that we used both the Central Subway and Van Ness projects, both of which I had to clean up and bring to a conclusion. We use them as case studies to reinvent our approach to how we think about project major project investments and delivery.

The Central Subway project was doomed 15 years ago, both in its planning process and its procurement process. Well, it was designed by policymakers rather than project delivery people. It was designed under an assumption that we had limitless resources and we didn't need to think about how individual project components were going to be maintained.

And while there are things that I love about the Central Subway, it's also a great cautionary tale about project delivery. And that is one of the things that we've tried hard to build into the way the SFMTA does business now.

And I think the El Terrible project, which was on time and on budget, is a good example. Do you think in like a long, the long sweep of things, the Central Subway will ever become heavily used? Oh, absolutely. So we've seen huge ridership increases on the Central Subway. We had a 50% increase in ridership at Chinatown Station just over the last year. The Central Subway serves the densest part of San Francisco with the highest number of transit riders, which is specifically Chinatown.

And I do expect that someday it will be extended to North Beach and on to Venice, at which point it will become a really, really important link in the overall transportation system. Chinatown station is now having, you know, more riders than a station like Church Street station. So it is showing its promise, but it was a lot of money. Yeah.

Jeff writes on to say,

So I would encourage all of you to get involved in the SFMTA biking and rolling plan, which you can Google and sign up for updates, which is looking at trying to create a safe citywide network for people, whether they're using bicycles or motorized wheelchairs or skateboards or other mobility assistance devices. We want to make sure that every San Franciscan can get safely to school or to their doctor's appointment or wherever they're going.

Our limitation, like our limitation with all things, are politics and resources. And you can help us deal with both politics and resources by getting involved.

Listener Elliot writes in to say,

So people are going to always drive and that's okay. Our challenge in San Francisco, like in all cities, is how do we make the transition as we build more housing in order to make sure that the city remains affordable for the next generation of immigrants?

And again, it goes back to this fundamental geometric limitations. Driving a car is incredibly convenient and can be so joyful. And yet it's also a terribly inefficient use of space. So what we want to make sure is that as the city builds its 82,000 committed housing units,

that those people aren't forced to drive in front of you. In order to make sure that the city remains drivable for people who need to drive, we must continually invest in making the transit system fast, frequent, reliable, safe, and clean, and walking and biking safe and joyful for everyone at all times. And that's exactly what we are working on. And the best way to do that is to make the surface streets work.

And that is what we're steadily investing in. And again, the limitations are politics and resources. Here's an interesting question. Irby over on Blue Sky writes, I've intentionally avoided downtown due to increased costs of parking there. And Tumlin mentions that a lot of people aren't using those spaces. How is that effective pricing for those spots? It seems the increased costs have been effective at also reducing demand. Yeah.

So most of the public parking downtown has dropped in price because it's the city's policy, at least for publicly owned parking, to reduce the price of parking to the point where there's always a few spaces available. So we've dropped the meter rates in most of downtown San Francisco pretty significantly. And those meter spaces are full. It's the private garages that

And the 25% sales tax in the private garages, that's a big revenue loss. But we have no control over the pricing of the private garages. Interesting thing about why they haven't lowered their prices. Don't get me started. So knowing what you do, having come through San Francisco political landscape the last five years, as well as all the other things that have happened in the city as a result of the pandemic and other things,

Are you buying stock in San Francisco right now or are you worried about where the city is heading? So I've only been in San Francisco for, what, 35 years? But it's been long enough to have been through three economic boom and bust cycles. There is no better time to be in San Francisco than at this cusp moment between the bust and the coming boom. It is always the best time to be here.

And we're starting to finally see the most important signal of the next boom, which is dropping commercial rents. New businesses are being created.

New retail services are starting to flourish and the city is starting to reinvent itself. And if the city does what it so often has done over the last 200 years, it has the possibility of reinventing not only what the next San Francisco is, but what's next for cities. And how do we use our San Francisco values in order to make sure that everyone benefits from this next economic upcycle?

It's interesting, though, because I think there's – I also, people probably know, am buying stock in San Francisco for sure. Spiritual stock, not financial stock. Yeah.

And at the same time, two things I think a lot about. You mentioned San Francisco values. People may have read Aaron Peskin's interview in Mission Local, and lots of people are talking about it. The politics of San Francisco, so-called San Francisco values, are really in flux right now, I think. There's an enormous amount of different types of money backing a kind of different...

different kind of San Francisco politics. Do you think there are still what we what you called San Francisco values and what would they be now? I think there are definitely San Francisco values. I think that here in San Francisco, we recognize that in order for everyone to get everything that they need,

that none of us can get everything that we want, right? That we live in a city where we've got to make trade-offs. And as we make decisions about trade-offs, we always need to start by thinking about folks who are the most vulnerable. Because the joy of being in a city like San Francisco is not the Victorian buildings or the views of the Golden Gate Bridge. The joy is the people.

This is a city of immigrants. It's a city of misfits and weirdos. That's why I came here. It's why I love writing Muni, particularly the 22 Fillmore. It's the best people watching in the world. And it requires that I think about myself. San Francisco also, you know, we don't...

Run this region like New York with multiple boroughs and one city and some vague sense of political coherence and obviously connected region here economically, culturally, socially and everything else. So listen, right. What are the prospects for a coherent or at least semi coherent Bay Regional public economy?

transit system. Will Santa Clara and San Mateo counties ever recognize that it makes more sense to coordinate regionally rather than to stubbornly, it seems to me, pursue in-county goals first? Does it make sense for MTA to propose and promote or MTC to propose and promote a regional transit measure with a primary focus on funding public transportation, which prohibits use of funds for highway widening?

So that's a lot of different questions. Let me try to unpack that a little bit. So first of all, in the transportation world, form follows from finance. And that is largely because here in California, it takes a two thirds vote to create a new tax. And for sales tax, we have divvied up sales tax to the weirdest unit of California government, which is the county.

It's a lot easier to get a two-thirds vote at a county level than it is at a regional level. And that is one of the reasons why we have the different transit structures that we do.

That said, we don't need to change transit governance in order to make it look like one integrated system from a user perspective. And that is exactly what all of the transit agencies in the region are committed to doing, is that there is a single fair product, that there is fair coordination, including free transfers, that there are common policies for discount programs, a common wayfinding system, GTFS.

Everything that makes it look like from a user perspective, we actually have our acts together and are paying attention to our customers. And you'll see a lot of rollout of that in the coming six months as MTC reduces or implements the upgrades to the Clipper card, as well as begins implementation of the next round of fair coordination. What if all the...

regional commuter rail collapses, though? I mean, do you worry about that? Like, BART, Caltrain, ridership is so down. How do you think that the regional problems will end up affecting Muni, which has its own problems? Yeah. Well, one thing that is clear is that even though Muni is facing a dire financial catastrophe, BART is in worse shape. And there's no economic recovery in San Francisco without BART.

Muni itself is entirely dependent upon a strong, thriving BART and Caltrain, as well as making sure that the other operators work as well. And that's why we are working hard on a regional ballot measure for 2026. There's still a lot of details to be resolved there, but please do get organized to make sure that we can pass that measure or measures in 2026. And what if that doesn't happen?

than that economic boom cycle that I'm so excited about watching that stalls in its tracks. All the way on the other end of issues. Chad in San Francisco, welcome.

Hi, can you hear me? Yeah, sure can. Go ahead. Okay, great. Yeah. I love public transportation. You were talking about the ease of use being so important. And one thing I noticed, I recently did a trip to London and then also Portland, Oregon, and they both have implemented like a payment solution where if you have a credit card or just your Apple Pay phone, you can just beep in and get onto anything, a bus, the subway. And you mentioned, you know, we

upgrades to Clipper. I'm wondering if there's plans to do something like that because especially as being such a big tourist city, everybody, I always run into tourists who are like having problems figuring out how to get onto public transportation, but if they could just tap their card like in these other cities, it's,

That would be great. I'm just curious if there's any plans. So yes, indeed there is. In fact, I'm an early user. Later this winter, MTC will announce open loop payment where you can use any credit or debit card. But in the meantime, just download the Clipper app to your phone and you can use the Clipper app on your phone in order to pay at any Farragate or Fairbox in the nine county area.

So stepping back again, do you think it's possible that any American city that's not New York will ever leave the car dominant paradigm? Well, I think that it is possible, but I expect that it will be transitional.

that for so many American cities, we've built automobile dependency into the system. And we need to respect particularly working class people who don't have jobs that are transit accessible in a place like downtown San Francisco, but have to drive to suburban locations

We need to make sure that everyone is there with the transition. And that's why we've been working so carefully in San Francisco to make sure that as we improve muni speed and reliability and bike and pedestrian safety, that we're trying hard to not take away critical network capacity for people who need to drive.

Couple last things. You know, Richard writes, Valencia should have never had a bike lane. Sorry, but Tomlin's proposals for this bike lane. Ridiculous as the original bike lane idea, way too much traffic. Bike lane should be on Cap Street. So Cap Street is great. However, it doesn't go anywhere. It dead ends on the south on Cesar Chavez. It doesn't even make it to Market Street. People, regardless of what mode of transportation they're using, want traffic.

use the route that is safest and most convenient. For all of our streets, the challenge is how do we best balance all of the competing needs in a limited amount of right-of-way? Simply telling the cars to go somewhere else or the cyclists or pedestrians to go somewhere else, that doesn't necessarily solve the problem. Yeah.

Wendy writes in to say, please thank Jeffrey Tumlin for doing such a good job with Muni. Even during the pandemic, it was reliable. It's been the best since I moved here 30 years ago. I was hoping he would have run for mayor. We have been talking with Jeffrey Tumlin, of course, recently stepped down as the director of SFMTA. That's Muni to most of us. Thank you so much for joining us this morning. Thank you, Alexis.

Thanks so much to all of our callers and commenters. Sorry we couldn't get to everyone. Really appreciate your participation. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour of Forum Ahead with guest host Grace Wan.

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