Muni Considers No More Transfers (Or It’ll Cost You) (w/update)
Photo by Flickr user cbcastro
Update (11:37 p.m.): SFGate reports that the MTA board today rejected the measure to charge for transfers or cease issuing them at all. Streetsblog SF also has the story. Good news for riders!
Original post: I wish I had a more cheery post to bring you, like, here’s a picture of a really cute kid/dog on the bus or something, but alas, that is not today.
At today’s budget meeting, the SFMTA considered either getting rid of Muni transfers or charging 50 cents for each transfer to close up the budget deficit for the next two years. The Chronicle reports that charging for transfers could generate $7.5 million; getting rid of the transfers altogether would get MTA $20 million. SFMTA has, by the way, $100 million in projected deficit for the next two fiscal years. A proposal to cut Muni service by 5 percent is also on the table, reports San Francisco Business Times.
Streetsblog’s Michael Rhodes wrote that many of MTA’s ideas would be “politically difficult” to execute, and that “eliminating free transfers is almost certain to be stopped in its tracks.”
The MTA board is set to vote on the budget next month, so these proposals are still just ideas right now.
Meanwhile, you might have heard about the alternative transit budget proposal from the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research (SPUR) [pdf], which a Chronicle editorial has called, a “spread-the-pain” approach. That’s certainly preferable to Muni service cuts that transit riders will be facing soon. Right?
It’s just a distraction to make the service cuts seem less awful.
The system simply isn’t designed or capable of getting you from one location to another without a transfer much of the time. While this was previously just a symptom of a terrible transit system this would have the potential of trying to turn it into a way for Muni to try and squeeze even more money out of us. Not to mention how much the service cuts are likely to compound this problem.
I doubt there’s any way this could possibly come to pass. As bad as the Muni experience is, as horrifying that they’re no closer to fulfilling Prop E than they were a decade ago, there’s simply no way this would be tolerated.
Hey if anyone has an art project they’d like to do with a bunch of transfers I have like 200 that I’ve saved from my years riding MUNI. When I saw the image at the top of this it reminded me of them….