Looking Back at Muni Forward: New Video Showcases Improvements
A screenshot from the Streetfilms video, “Riders First: How Buses Are Moving San Francisco Forward.”
It can be easy to lose track of all our efforts to move Muni Forward, so it’s helpful to get a fresh look and take stock of the work we’ve done.
A video released last week called “Riders First: How Buses Are Moving San Francisco Forward,” produced by the nonprofit organizations Streetfilms and TransitCenter, highlighted our “systematic, rider-centric approach to improving bus service across the city.”
From Streetfilms:
This policy and implementation effort, dubbed “Muni Forward,” has been bolstered by a $500 million dollar injection of funding approved by voters in 2014, which enabled new capital investments to improve transportation access in an already service-rich city.
Muni Forward comprises a suite of service improvements, including dedicated bus lanes (“red carpets”), the first implementation of all-door boarding in a major American transit system, stop consolidation, transit signal priority, and the branding of a Rapid Network of bus routes in high impact corridors.
As Muni's operations director, John Haley, put it in the video, “It's been a really transformative period over the last five or six years for us.”
Muni Forward “was the first real comprehensive look at the entire network not just a couple of lines in a few hours we looked at the system top-to-bottom,” he said.
Here’s a snapshot of our recent improvements to bus service, which are the focus of the video:
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More than four rounds of service increases since 2015, including the biggest service expansion since the 1970s and more all-night Owl service. Our latest service improvements were on February 25.
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The launch of systemwide all-door boarding in 2012 (the first major American transit agency to do so), and a 25-cent fare discount for cash-free fares this January, to speed up boarding.
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“Rapid” improvements, with upgrades like red transit-only lanes, to boost service on routes from the 14 Mission, to the 9 San Bruno. In one project, we extended two-way traffic on Sansome Street to speed up the 10 and 12 routes.
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Hundreds of new, more reliable buses to replace our fleet, with an expansion extended buses.
Of course, Muni is comprised of a variety of vehicles, and we’re also boosting Muni Metro service: From the L Taraval Rapid improvements going in now, to double stopping in the subway, to focused increases in Metro shuttle service to reduce crowding, to the new generation of Muni trains rolling out this year.
As we make further improvements to the system, we continue to listen to our riders’ needs. With a record 70 percent of riders rating Muni service “good” or “excellent” in our latest annual customer satisfaction survey, the improvements seem to be noticed.