Moving Forward on Muni

Ten years ago, we began implementing an ongoing series of transit improvements as part of a new program called Muni Forward. These improvements have made Muni faster, more reliable, more frequent, easier to access and safer.  

In this episode, we celebrate Muni Forward.

We learn about history of the program and some of the specific improvements we've made. We speak with SFMTA Transit Director Julie Kirschbaum, Muni Chief Planning and Implementation Officer Sean Kennedy, Transit Priority Manager Michael Rhodes and Transit Engineering Team Manager Cheryl Liu. We also hear from riders and a small business owner who discuss their experiences with Muni.

Transcript

MELISSA CULROSS, HOST: For the last decade, we’ve been making transit improvements in San Francisco as part of a program we call Muni Forward.

MUNI RIDER: The ride’s much better. Um, it’s just amazing how, like, that experience has changed over the years.

MELISSA: Welcome to Taken with Transportation, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s Official podcast. I’m your host, Melissa Culross, and in this episode, we are celebrating the ten-year anniversary of Muni Forward. We’ll talk about the history of the program, many of the improvements we’ve made and what’s next. But we begin…at a party. 

KATE MCCARTHY: Thanks everyone for joining our Ten Years of Muni Forward Bar Crawl. Tonight, we’re really highlighting that Muni is a great option for accessing nightlife citywide. 

MELISSA: We’re at Zeitgeist on Valencia Street talking with Miranda who has joined the bar crawl.

MIRANDA: I’m a big fan of public transit, in general. And I actually just moved to SF from Brooklyn, New York. And I’ve been bussing around a lot, and I thought, “What a great way to learn more about the city by joining this event.” So, I just jumped on it.

MELISSA: So how does Muni compare with New York City transit?

MIRANDA: I love how on time it is, like, how integrated with Google Maps. Like, the time is so accurate. I just didn’t get that in Brooklyn at all. 

MELISSA: After a drink at Zeitgeist the crawl moves on.

KATE: Right now, we’re about to hop on the 49 Van Ness-Mission to go to Van Ness and Geary.

MELISSA: From there, we walk a couple of blocks to Kung Fu Action Theatre…which actually is a bar. And the crawlers settle in.

BAR CRAWL PARTICIPANT: This is quite the vibe, and I’m loving it.

MELISSA: While we’re here, we meet Annmarie Wong and ask her why she’s bar crawling with us.

ANNMARIE WONG: This is such a great opportunity just to connect with other transit, you know, lovers, Muni lovers and just appreciating what Muni has done for our city and for just people like me. You know, like, I was born and raised here, and I depend on Muni 24-7. I took Muni to my first job, to prom, to basically everywhere. And I’m just, like, so thankful that I can have something that can take care of me for the rest of my life.
 
 MELISSA: You took Muni to prom?!?
 
 ANNMARIE: Yes. So, the prom was actually right down the street on Geary. So, my friends and I took the 49 straight to that hotel…I don’t…I forget what it’s called, but we took it to prom. City kids. 

MELISSA: Annmarie goes on about the benefits of riding Muni.

ANNMARIE: Just not, like, depending on a car is such a great thing, especially when I was younger. When I went to college, and I meet other people, they’re like, “Oh, we couldn’t even go anywhere until we got our driver’s license.” I was like, “What?!?” I am so thankful that I grew up in a city because I have the opportunity to have that type of freedom and mobility. And once I got older, like, I appreciate it even more because it’s, like, one less stress thing in my life. 

MELISSA: As much fun as the bar crawl is, we’re going to leave and go back to the origins of Muni Forward.

JULIE KIRSCHBAUM, SFMTA TRANSIT DIRECTOR: Muni Forward is a comprehensive program to make Muni service fast, frequent, reliable, clean and safe. And it’s everything from the “red carpet” dedicated lanes that everybody associates with the program to some of the smaller and more incremental treatments we make to get transit out of bottlenecks and through slow intersections. 

MELISSA: That’s our Transit Director Julie Kirschbaum. Before she became transit director, Kirschbaum began the work that would become Muni Forward.

JULIE: I started at SFMTA in 2007 to lead a comprehensive system study designed to make Muni more cost effective, more reliable and more attractive to our customers. At the time, we were experiencing a lot of crowding and other operational challenges. And we found that there were a lot of opportunities to make the service better. There were a lot of places where Muni vehicles were stuck in traffic. We also found that because the system had grown organically over decades…really, the span of over a hundred years…there were a number of places where we had redundancies, or that we weren’t serving new and emerging communities.

MELISSA: This study was called the Transit Effectiveness project or TEP, and the Great Recession hit shortly after it began. 

JULIE: So, some of the efficiency measures were put in place as part of budget adjustments at that time. But the more complex work of “How do we make the system faster and more reliable?” really started in earnest in 2014 when we rolled out the first dedicated lane and began an intensive public outreach and community process to look at ways to improve the reliability and the speed of our transit system. 

MELISSA: And when Kirschbaum describes the outreach process as intensive, she means it.

JULIE: We spoke to over a hundred community groups. A lot of the conversations were passionate and intense. Changing a system that grew organically over a hundred years was pretty scary for folks. So, while it was an exciting time, and we had a lot of visionary discussions, we also had a lot of hard discussions about eliminating routes, taking a different approach to our city’s streets. And those conversations led to a lot of changes in the plan that I think ultimately made it stronger when we went to implement. But it was intense. It was a lot of hard discussions and a lot of trade-offs.

MELISSA: At that point, the agency had brought on Sean Kennedy…who now is the chief planning and implementation officer for Muni…to implement the TEP and turn all the planning work into reality.

SEAN KENNEDY, MUNI CHIEF PLANNING AND IMPLEMENTATION OFFICER: We started to roll out the program, and we, we knew the first thing we had to do was change the name. And so, we changed from TEP to Muni Forward. Basically, because we wanted something more action sounding, kinda catchy. TEP is really bureaucratic and not very exciting sounding. So, we wanted to change the name. And then we started a process of prioritizing which corridors we would take through, um, the kinda outreach phase, go through, get Board approval and then work on actual implementation. And so, the reliability of the system was the number one problem that people saw with Muni 10, 12 years ago. A simple request: when we say a bus is supposed to show up, have a bus show up.

MELISSA: Kennedy notes that the work of making Muni reliable…not to mention fast, frequent, clean and safe…is part of a bigger picture goal.

SEAN: Muni Forward fundamentally, and really, the Transit Planning group, operates under this mantra of expanding opportunity. And that is really how we look at our job as providing opportunities for everybody in this city. Regardless of race, income, nationality, to have access to, you know, opportunities to grow their lives through education, through visiting friends, through job opportunities. And so, the main, like, kinda meta goal of Muni Forward and of anything that we do, service planning wise or capital wise, is related to expanding opportunities And so, our strategy to improve opportunity in this city…one of the strategies is called Muni Forward. It’s, like, making changes to the system and the street.

MELISSA: So, let’s talk about the changes we’ve made over the last decade to improve Muni service. We’re at the intersection of Church and Market Streets to discuss them with SFMTA Transit Priority Manager Michael Rhodes.

MICHAEL RHODES, SFMTA TRANSIT PRIORITY MANAGER: Some of the first improvements that we made were a series of pilots that, kind of, let us dip our toes into transit priority and the Muni Forward program, in general. And the first red transit lanes in the city, in fact, were here on Church Street. Right here between Duboce Avenue and 16th Street. And this included taking the center lane of the street and turning it into a red Muni bus-taxi-only lane benefitting the J Church and the 22 Fillmore. It helped improve travel time through this corridor and sort of showed us how this can work. And since time, we’ve expanded red transit lanes to a lot more locations. We have about 22 miles now of red transit lanes and 75 miles, total, of transit lanes across the city. So, you’ll see those all over the place, in places like Geary, places like Mission Street, places like Hyde Street, where we installed them recently in the Tenderloin. But there’s also a lot of other types of improvements. Things like wider sidewalks at transit stops, boarding islands at transit stops to improve safety and accessibility, traffic signals that stay green longer for buses and trains…and we have those here on Church Street, too...wheelchair accessible ramps which we’ve installed here to make the train accessible. Really a toolkit of about two dozen or so different design improvements we do along transit lines to speed them up, improve, reliability, improve accessibility and provide more space for amenity for customers.

MELISSA: And these projects have added up over the years.

MICHAEL: We’ve made about 100 miles of corridor improvements since 2014. From Church Street to Mission Street to Taraval Street, Geary and some lesser-known corridors like Hyde Street or 7th and 8th Streets where we’ve done transit lanes that fewer people are aware of them, but they’ve made a big impact in terms of the reliability of the system. So, our highest ridership bus line in the whole city these days is the 14 Mission-14R Mission Rapid. We’ve made improvements on Mission all the way from the northern terminal near the Ferry Building on down through the Mission District. And now we’re under construction on additional improvements in the Excelsior section of Mission Street. So, if you ride the 14 Mission today from downtown all the way out to, uh, Daly city, you’re gonna see improvements like transit lanes. You might notice the signal staying green a little longer for you. You’re gonna notice improved bus stops, wider sidewalks at the stop. You’re gonna notice left turn restrictions at some locations. So, that’s gonna improve the pedestrian safety at that intersection, but it’s also gonna keep the buses moving. And as a result, we’ve seen across that whole line, a nine-percent reduction from end-to-end travel time. But when you zoom in on sections like SoMa, Mission Street in SoMa, you’re gonna see up to a 31% improvement in travel time.

MELISSA: How are the projects carried out?

MICHAEL: We’ve got a couple ways we might go about, you know, building a Muni Forward project. Sometimes the best way to do it is…you’ve got a repaving project or another big city project…they’re gonna replace the sewers. And that’s the time to go in and say, ‘We’re gonna join that. We’re gonna minimize disruption by adding our improvements. Say, a wider, you know, sidewalk at the corner or a traffic signal with a signal priority for transit into that same process.” That reduces disruption, but it also takes longer to get to the benefits. So, the other side of the coin for Muni Forward is the Quick Build process where, as soon as we have a project approved by our board and is ready to go ahead, we do everything we can with paint and, and plastic and anything that our own shops can implement. And in fact, in some cases, we even have the Public Works concrete folks going out there and building boarding islands or other, other infrastructure on a much quicker timeline. So, there’s that Quick Build approach that helps us get benefits sooner while also partnering with other construction projects, other efforts that might be underway to minimize disruption and deliver the best impact for Muni Forward.

MELISSA: And once a particular project is complete, is that the end of the Muni Forward work in that area? Not at all, says Rhodes.

MICHAEL: We love to look at our corridors with the highest ridership in kind of an iterative or, or persistent way. We keep coming back; we’re never done. You never have the perfect transit corridor. You’re always making improvements, and you’re always responding to changing conditions on the street. So, when we see that there’s an area of the city that’s going to be growing, let’s be ready with more capacity on that train line, or, or protect us from the traffic congestion we know is coming. There is no final project. Everything is always changing in this city. And so, we have to be changing and keeping up with the times and keeping ahead of the times, as well.

MELISSA: Across Church Street from where we have been talking with Rhodes is the bakery and café Thorough Bread and Pastry. Since it has been here for 16 years, we go in and ask owner and manager Juliemarie Suas what kind of impact the Muni Forward improvements made on Church have had on her business.

JULIEMARIE SUAS: Well, at first, we were a little skeptical ‘cause it did take away a lot of our, like, parking spaces. And so, at first, we were like, “Ooh man, this is going to be a tough one.” But it actually brought in like a… I feel like it almost brought in a new generation of people. Which kind of brought in new regulars and people who now bring their, like, breakfast here, and then they go to work. And then it’s fun to see people that are, like, on their way to work or on their way home from home from work, and they always stop in. And it’s like a nice hub now.

MELISSA: Thorough Bread and Pastry also has been part of our Muni Forward anniversary celebration, including the Tasty Transit Tour…a Muni tour of bakeries around town, much like the bar crawl. Suas is happy to be included.

JULIEMARIE: Events like this are really important for our community and our neighborhood. I mean, especially if people aren’t specifically from this neighborhood and they take the train to, like, go out into different areas. I think this helps people learn how to take transit if they haven’t, or they’re nervous or scared to do it. This kind of, like, gives you a motivation to learn to do that, and I think it’s opening new doors. It creates, like, a space and a community, and I think it’s, like, really important to continue that. And I think more things like this should happen, and it’s great.

MELISSA: We leave Church and Market and head across town to 19th Avenue and Lincoln Way near Golden Gate Park where we are talking about some Muni Forward improvements in this area with Cheryl Liu. Liu manages the agency’s Transit Engineering and Intelligent Transportation Systems team… a group of about 20 engineers. We’re discussing the impacts of a transit-only left turn lane that we’re looking at on Lincoln at 19th.

CHERYL LIU, TRANSIT ENGINEERING AND ITS TEAM MANAGER: That allows 29 Sunset bus to get into that lane where we have sensors installed in the pavement to provide the left turn signals for the 29 Sunset to make a left turn onto Crossover Drive going northbound. Prior to this improvement, the Sunset…29 Sunset bus have to make multiple turns in order to go northbound. They have to make a right turn onto 20th Avenue, make a left turn onto Irving, make another left onto 19th Avenue. So, this dedicated left turn lane really improved 29 Sunset on-time performance and also customer experience.

MELISSA: Liu also discusses the carpool lanes…also known as high occupancy vehicle or HOV lanes…that we installed along Crossover Drive in the park. Those first urban HOV lanes in the country continue along portions of Park Presidio and Lombard and help ease traffic congestion for Muni. Along 19th Avenue, we’ve installed wider sidewalks at bus stops and transit signals that stay green longer for buses…like Michael Rhodes was describing earlier in the episode. Liu tells us all of these things have led to improved travel times along the 28 and 28 Rapid bus routes. 

Now, part of what makes all these Muni Forward improvements possible…we learn…is that fact that Liu’s group works in a collaborative way that’s fairly innovative.

CHERYL: Our engineering team is responsible or involved in infrastructure designing, planning process. We also meet our transit operators to learn their firsthand experience of navigating buses and trains across the city. And through that experience, we learned so much about transit operations and in turn, allow us to design better infrastructure improvement. And this also allowed us to become well-rounded engineers. Traditionally, transportation-traffic engineers work on our own. We live in our own organizational structure. When you add another dimension, transit operations, you see things very differently. So, allow you to think more broadly, more creatively and, uh, more prioritize transit operations and value the tradeoffs to develop better solutions.

MELISSA: And while Liu points out that she simply is representing her entire team in this discussion…and that this work is not all about her…she takes a lot of pride in what she does.

CHERYL-3: I, myself, I grew up in Shanghai. Riding bikes and, uh, take buses were my way of getting around. Having the opportunity to work in initiatives that would transform San Francisco’s transit system is really near and dear to me. And San Francisco is the second most dense U.S. city after New York City. Our Transit First policy is really a must in order to get people where they need to go in a safe and efficient manner.

MELISSA: Just in case you aren’t familiar, the Transit First policy Liu mentions was adopted by the Board of Supervisors a half century ago and prioritizes public transit, biking and walking on our streets. 
 
 

We’ve learned a lot about Muni Forward in this episode, and we can’t emphasize enough that riders are noticing…even if they don’t know the details of the work we do. Michael Artukovich has been a Muni rider for a couple of decades and definitely has recognized the changes in recent years.

MICHAEL ARTUKOVICH: I use the N Judah very frequently. I use the 12 a lot. Let’s see, what else? I also just off the 49. Love taking the 49 into the Mission and hanging out over there. I have lots of friends over there. The experience is totally different. It’s super clean. The ride’s much better. Um, it’s just amazing how, like, that experience has changed over the years. And it’s all just through, you know, the city and SFMTA making a huge investment in transit for all of us, which is incredible.

MELISSA: We’ve also heard repeatedly while making this episode that people associate Muni not just with San Francisco, the city, but with community. La Doña, a musician and educator who grew up in Bernal Heights and the Mission, puts it like this.

LA DOÑA: There are so few places where people of different class backgrounds find themselves, especially now, this day and age. Like, there’s Uber, or there’s Lyft, or there’s Door Dash. They don’t go grocery shopping. So, there’s, I feel like there are fewer places in this world where people from different backgrounds meet. And that’s what I always saw on Muni. And that I always loved about Muni is that you see people from all different walks of life in all different places, and you’re together.

MELISSA: Okay, we’ve been doing Muni Forward work for a decade, and we’re seeing the results. So where do we go from here? To answer that question, we turn back to Muni Chief Planning and Implementation Officer Sean Kennedy.

SEAN: Our initial round of, of Muni Forward was to improve reliability, which I think we’ve accomplished. But now, our next phase is really looking at a more holistic view of each corridor and saying, like, “What would it take so that buses and trains only stop at transit stops along these corridors?” We still get a lot of traffic signal delay. We still get stuck in congestion. So, we’re gonna be focusing over the next ten years on what we call our five-minute network and rolling out this idea that you should be able to go to some of these main corridors and just not even need a schedule, not need to look at your phone. There should be a bus coming reliably or a train coming reliably every five minutes. And so, trying to only stop at transit stops on these corridors is really the goal to give we think a real backbone and a way to offer expanding opportunities to the entire city.

MELISSA: Transit Director Julie Kirschbaum.

JULIE: What I’m excited to do is continue to improve the rider experience on our heaviest ridership corridors until we get to a point that riding transit becomes the easiest way to get around our city.

MELISSA: Thank you for joining us on TAKEN WITH TRANSPORTATION. We’re a production of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, and you can find the latest episodes at SFMTA.com-slash-Podcast, as well as Apple, Spotify, our YouTube channel or wherever you listen. If you’d like to learn more about Muni Forward and read our in-depth report on the first 10 years of the program, go to SFMTA.com-slash-Muni-Forward. We had production assistance on this episode from Nick Veronin, and I’m Melissa Culross. Be well and travel well.