Here we go again: San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency is in financial quicksand, forcing it to shed weight and ditch basic services in order to claw out of the muck.
The SFMTA faces a deficit that could balloon beyond $300 million by June 2026, and the $50 million shortfall this year means that it is cutting Muni service by 4% in coming months. The agency predicts the move will save $15 million, and it claims it can improve parking revenues and fare enforcement to make up the remaining $35 million.
Muni has been here before, whether during the Great Depression, the turn of the millennium, or the 2008 recession. Turns out, financial crashes do ruin the ability of cities, states and the federal government to provide money for essential social services like public transit — and once again, we’ve landed in an exhausting cycle straight out of Groundhog Day.
And, because time is a flat circle, the city is about to be subjected to the same exact playbook that we’ve lived through before: a thousand little cuts to our services.
Although service cuts have helped Muni survive in the past, experts warn that this ‘solution’ can bleed out a transit system over time, leading to a spiral of lower service, reduced ridership, and eventual collapse. This is an existential crisis for any public transit system. We keep letting it happen.
Muni and other mass transit systems have long been viewed as a kind of public utility, running off of user revenue with a modest amount of government subsidy. But some experts are now urging that transit be viewed as a public service, in which cost-effectiveness and revenue are considered far less important than the systemic benefits of transit use for broader society.
That, of course, would demand a major infusion of government dollars, used to fund daily operations rather than longer-term capital improvement projects (like fixing Muni’s train control system). It would be a radical shift in how such subsidies work in our city.
Radical or otherwise, it’s an approach that’s being embraced elsewhere, including in Massachusetts and a recent trial in New York City.
Muni is a beloved system, and it’s worth saving. Its rider surveys from 2024 show rising customer satisfaction with service, timeliness and safety, with ratings of “good” or “excellent” from 72% of respondents, the highest rate since the survey launched in 2001. And that improvement happened despite a fiscal picture that’s been disastrous for decades, even before the impact of the pandemic, which led to falling ridership levels, lower parking usage, and a hit to the city’s general fund, which covers more than a third of Muni’s budget.
We could blame this on local leadership, of course, but this exact pattern is unfolding in cities across the country. The crisis is so daunting that in 2023, former U.S. transportation secretary Anthony Foxx described the present as “the most urgent time, perhaps, in the history of transit in America.”
What remains is a challenging binary: Transit operators are either thriving because they’ve secured long-term tax revenues, as seen in Hong Kong, or they are struggling because they have not evolved and now lack sustainable channels for revenue. Worse, being successful as a transit system makes you less eligible for state and federal funding, limiting an agency’s ability to maintain a rainy day fund.
San Francisco had a shot to improve tax revenues with Proposition L, which would have taken funds from rideshare and autonomous vehicle businesses to fund public transit. But its “victory” at the polls was undercut by the passing of Proposition M, a bill to lower business taxes that has effectively neutered Prop. L.
Now Muni faces three options, all involving service cuts: Suspend routes with fewer riders; eliminate “rapid” lines and small-scale “connector” buses; or focus cuts with the goal of preserving service in communities with more low-income residents who rely on transit.
Perhaps this seems like a moderate path forward — but it’s completely contrary to the advice from the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, or SPUR. The nonprofit has run analyses of Bay Area transit and concluded that the strongest path to recovery is faster, more reliable service, which will draw more riders.
Cutting services in the face of a deficit makes sense only if we think of public transit as a business, privy to the swells of supply and demand. Doing so ignores the obvious. We should be supporting transit because it’s good for the planet, road congestion, and the people who live in our city.
It’s embarrassing to be grappling with a $50 million Muni deficit in the second-richest city in the world, with so many centimillionaires and billionaires that you could throw a rock anywhere in Pacific Heights and hit one. But instead of thinking creatively about how to save it, we’re trapped in a circular conversation about a ‘70s-era budget framework that makes no sense in 2025.
In 2006, SPUR wrote a discomfiting hypothesis for the future: “It will only take a few more rounds of service cuts to reduce Muni to a transit system of last resort for those that have no other option.”
We should have heeded that warning two decades ago. But now, it’s really time to stop pretending that service cuts and half-measures will save a system — and a city — that deserves transformative solutions.
