Muni is facing a budget shortfall, and to solve that problem a group is proposing we tax Uber, Lyft and Taxi rides to make up the budget. This is emblematic of how San Francisco tries to solve problems by taxing them to death. Creating new taxes might bridge the budget gap but fails to address the core issue of ridership being down from pre-lockdowns.
Why is is ridership down?
There are two primary reasons that ridership has dropped off.
Work from home culture. When Mayor London Breed announced the 2 weeks to slow the spread, that ended up lasting years. Put a bullet in the head of ridership many companies switched to remote policy and their employees left the city for other cities. Before the lockdowns, we had about 250,000 people commuting into downtown San Francisco daily. Now that number is less than 50,000.
Public safety & no fare enforcement. If you’ve been on a bus recently some of lines have become mobile drug dens for addicts, who besides from from using drugs on buses make messes and harass riders.
That combined with SFMTA’s mismanagement has led to the current situation. We have a Director who seems more focused on making it difficult to drive in San Francisco rather than ensuring buses are running on time, that are clean and safe.
The Solution:
Like many things there isn’t a silver bullet that will fix everything however there are a few things we can do.
Split SFMTA and Muni up, having Muni go back to focusing on running the buses and fare enforcement. SFMTA can go back to focusing on parking, traffic, and ticketing issues. I firmly believe that with better deployment of traffic officers, we could reduce congestion and raise a lot of money from ticketing bad drivers. With fare enforcement homeless will have less free range on the buses and people will feel safer on board. The city has logged 555 assaults on SFMTA employees over the past 3½ years, 494 of which were against transit operators. If operators/Drivers aren’t safe how will the passengers be?
Executive cuts: Cut the pay of executive staff, it’s time to trim the fat in middle management we need to cut roles and executive pay until ridership has returned to pre-lockdown levels.
We can also work with large employers in the downtown area to create incentives for coming into the office more often. We need to increase ridership or no amount of taxation will make sense.
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