Time to Sharpen the Pitchforks?
SFMTA will be holding its first public hearing on proposed route cuts and fare hikes (as well as other measures the agency has proposed to close a $130 million budget deficit for the next fiscal year) today at 2 p.m. in Room 400 at City Hall.
If you go, to observe, to air grievances, to offer solutions, whatever your motive, let us and our readers know how it turns out in the comments here or an original post.
I had to e-mail Muni my comments, and they sent back the usual bla bla bla reply message.
One thing to think about: If Muni has to sell transfers for 50 cents, how about those passengers who will only take one bus or train to get a POP receipt? At what cost will Muni pay to modify its POP rules, issue separate fare receipts, etc.?
Akit kind of beat me to it, but I was going to mention that if you can’t make the hearing(s) you can email your comments. Here is the email address: sfmtabudget@sfmta.com
I emailed mine, not sure if it will do any good, but I think they need the reality check of a full inbox of public comments.
@Rachel and Akit: if you guys want, send us your suggestions and we’ll post them here. Akit, I did see the post on your site, so we could link to that if you’d like.
@everyone else: send your suggestions to MTA and publish them here. let’s get a dialog going. we’ve got Muni’s ear.
and no sooner did i post that last comment than this came to my RSS reader: Rescue Muni is asking for reader/rider comments and suggestions on SFMTA’s budget proposals.
Jeff,
You are free to use any portion of my statements on my blog and/or link to it (it’s part of my creative commons license).
I pointed out two items to SFMTA: Transfer policy in relation to POP rules, and the elimination of the 38-Geary Ocean Beach branch with substitution by the 18-46th Avenue. Literally, all I said to them is noted in my blog entry.
My favorite part of the meeting was “The 19-Polk doesn’t show up anymore on Sundays because bus drivers missing their runs because either they’re at home watching football or recovering from Saturday Night!”
I think it is absurd that Muni is proposing an 8 percent reduction in service that only reduces the operating budget by 3 percent. In addition, a large part of the deficit is a 14 million dollar overage in overtime costs for the 2009/2010 fiscal year. How can the overtime be over budget when the fiscal year hasn’t started yet?
Fora detailed breakdown of the budget deficit and info on the muni budget, check out the first post in this blog: http://www.terratruth.com/engineering-blog.html