SFMTA Plan to Improve Muni: Putting Service on the Street

This summer, many Muni riders noticed a decline in service as we experienced a temporary shortage of bus operators. In August, Mayor London Breed called on the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) to step up its efforts to provide the reliable and safe system that San Franciscans deserve. This blog is part two of a four-part series on our plan to set Muni on a sustainable path to providing excellent service and meet key performance targets within 90 days.

Proposition E, passed in 1999, mandates that Muni deliver 98.5 percent of scheduled service and maintain an 85 percent on-time record. The San Francisco Controller’s Office maintains a “performance scorecard” tracks Muni performance against these two voter-mandated targets as well as several other metrics, including bunching and gaps between vehicles and Muni collisions.

Over the past two months, the SFMTA has taken a series of actions to address riders’ concerns and deliver on Muni performance goals as part of our SFMTA Plan to Improve Muni. The first area we are addressing relates to delivering scheduled service, or what we call: “putting service on the street”.

To address an ongoing shortage of operators and meet the 90-day goal of delivering 96 percent of scheduled service, we are taking a series of actions, such as:

• Converting part-time operators to full-time
• Training larger classes of operators to bring them on more quickly
• Working to ensure that the operators we have are available for work
• Employing new teaching methods to ensure more operators successfully pass their training

Collectively, these actions, and many others in our plan, are helping improve on-time performance and reduce gaps in service.

Over the past two months, Muni has almost reached its 96 percent target for scheduled service. This is a significant improvement from less than 93 percent in August. We are confident that these actions will put the agency on the path to again meeting its Proposition E target of 98.5 percent by the end of the year.

Putting more scheduled service on the street is the most important step we can take to reduce wait times and enhance the reliability of the system. We will discuss service reliability in greater depth in part three of the series.

We are excited about the significant changes that we are making throughout the system and are confident that the end result will be a Muni system that San Franciscans can be proud to ride.

Tomorrow, Part Three: Enhancing Reliability