Every Muni ride you take matters to us! Learn how we’ve been giving some love to routes across our system that saw the biggest delays.
This Transit Month, we are going behind the scenes of our work to improve Muni rides citywide.
Today, we showcase our Transit Delay Hot Spots Program. We launched it in 2020 to speed up your rides on the 10 slowest short segments of the entire Muni network. At these delay “hot spots,” Muni crawled from one stop to another at just four miles per hour or less.
Since Muni matters so much to local residents, we got to work fixing hot spots across the city. Even as the pandemic caused setbacks, we kept driving changes at each hot spot.
Learn why Muni can face delays and what we can do to speed up your rides.
And see how we reduced delays at many of the top 10 hot spots – with one location seeing up to 74% travel time savings!
What can slow Muni down?
Muni can face delays for a wide range of reasons. Here are some of the most common:
- Stop placement. Your trips can take longer when two stops are closely spaced to one another. Delays can also happen when stops are located just before traffic signals and operators get stuck at a red light after serving the stop.
- Signal timing. Sometimes vehicles can catch a lot of red lights when signals aren’t quite timed for transit travel speeds.
- Traffic congestion. When there’s heavy traffic, or vehicles are double parked, circling for spots or loading goods, it can take longer for vehicles to move forward.
- Difficult turns. When a route involves a tight turn where buses have to cross multiple lanes, they must move slowly. Stop spacing and double parking or loading in the travel lane can worsen this kind of delay.
Through our hot spot program, we made changes at two stops along the 44 O’Shaughnessy to improve travel times.
Speeding up your trips with a proven toolkit
Luckily, we have a toolkit full of possibilities to fix transit slowdowns – thanks to our Muni Forward program. Over a decade, this program has made Muni more reliable and safer through over 100 miles of transit improvements on our busiest routes. The changes we made helped reduce travel times by up to 35%!
So, when the data came in for our top 10 delay hot spots? We turned right to our Muni Forward toolkit. Here are some of the proven tactics to reduce delays:
- Stop changes. When we notice that stop placement is slowing down trips, we have a few options.
- We can remove a stop when two are located very close together and the loss wouldn’t cause major impacts. Or we can move a stop to either side of an intersection. This change can help vehicles only stop once to drop off or pick up passengers.
- We can remove a stop when two are located very close together and the loss wouldn’t cause major impacts. Or we can move a stop to either side of an intersection. This change can help vehicles only stop once to drop off or pick up passengers.
- Signal adjustments. There are a few ways we can adjust traffic signals to speed up Muni trips.
- We can adjust signal timing along Muni routes so that they better match transit speeds. We can also introduce what’s called transit signal priority. This approach directly benefits Muni vehicles, giving them longer green lights.
- We can adjust signal timing along Muni routes so that they better match transit speeds. We can also introduce what’s called transit signal priority. This approach directly benefits Muni vehicles, giving them longer green lights.
- Curb and traffic management. Sometimes we can speed up Muni trips with a little bit of paint.
- We can do this by adjusting where cars are able to turn or by providing a separate turn lane. This prevents long lines of vehicles that cause Muni riders to sit in traffic. As a result, we help Muni vehicles travel faster through intersections while making sure people driving have other options to turn.
- We can also adjust loading zones and other curb uses to make it easier for vehicles to use travel lanes.
One stretch of the 27 Bryant is seeing a 74% travel time savings after we shifted the bus to a more direct route with less traffic congestion. Learn the details below.
By the numbers: Giving you time back
We used a wide range of these Muni Forward tactics to address our top ten delay hot spots.
To understand their impact, we compared travel times along the hot spots before and after our treatments.
Big wins for riders
We’ve seen some great results! Here are the top five wins we drove for riders. They are listed based on which hot spots saw the biggest delays before our treatments:
- 37 Corbett - Church and Market streets: We removed one of two stops at the same intersection to improve travel time. Now, there is a travel time savings of up to 31% on the slowest trips.
- 44 O’Shaughnessy - Woodside Avenue and Portola Drive. We removed one of two stops at the same intersection to improve travel time. We also set up transit signal priority to give buses longer green lights. The results: travel time savings up to 24%.
- 54 Felton - Van Dyke Avenue and Lane Street. We removed one of two stops located at the same intersection. This shortened travel times in this segment up to 44%, or about one minute, during the morning peak.
- 27 Bryant - Cyril Magnin and Market streets. We adjusted this route so that it could run partly on a dedicated transit lane. This helped improve travel times up to 74%.
- 8AX/BX Bayshore Express - Kearny and Sutter streets. We made signal timing improvements at a key hot spot as part of a larger project. As a result, the slowest trips improved by up to 30%, or 45 seconds, during the morning peak.
Note: The “slowest trips” are the slowest 10% of trips per week (90% percentile travel times).
For the full list of hotspots and more details on our work to reduce delays at Muni’s slowest stretches citywide, see our Project Update: Round 1 Hot Spots webpage.
Working all year long to make your rides more reliable
Every ride you take with us matters! This hot spot program is part of our year-round work to make Muni faster and more reliable citywide.
To learn more, you can check out our Taken with Transportation podcast. In our “Moving You Forward on Muni” episode, we celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Muni Forward and dive into the work we have done to speed up travel times. You can find it at our podcast webpage (SFMTA.com/Podcast) or wherever you listen.