M Ocean View Transit and Safety Project
Using the feedback received from our surveys, self-guided open house and community partner meetings, we have developed ideas for transit, safety and accessibility improvements for the M Ocean View and project corridor.
Look over our project materials and then share your feedback on these ideas.
Please note that the ideas shown on the materials are not final - extensive community feedback will be used to help us build a detailed project proposal, which we expect to share later this fall.
The M Ocean View connects the Ocean View district to downtown San Francisco via the Twin Peaks Tunnel and the Balboa Park BART station. It also provides the Ocean View district with access to educational institutions including San Francisco State University and City College of San Francisco.
The M Ocean View had a ridership of over 30,000 people per day before the pandemic, which is recovering steadily. The line serves a high percentage of people from households with low incomes and people of color. As a result, the Muni Service Equity Strategy identified the line as a priority for improvements in the Ocean View neighborhood.
The M Ocean View Transit and Safety Project will focus on improvements along the M Ocean View between Junipero Serra Boulevard and Balboa Park BART Station. Our goals are to:
- Improve reliability for M Ocean View riders
- Enhance accessibility for people with disabilities along the corridor as many stops do not have fully accessible boarding areas
- Improve safety for people walking
The project is part of the Muni Forward program, which is delivering transit priority and reliability improvements across the Muni system.
Project Outreach
The project team is working closely with the Ocean View community to determine where improvements need to be made and will use this feedback to help shape our proposals. During the first round of outreach, our project team met with stakeholders to learn about their experiences with the route and improvement priorities. Pop-up events were also conducted in-language along the corridor with multilingual staff and a multilingual self-guided open house was available at the Ocean View Public Library for the community to learn about the project and share their feedback.
Multilingual rider and neighborhood surveys were also completed as part of the first round of outreach to gather feedback on improvement priorities. Results from both surveys showed reducing wait times to be the top priority, followed by reducing travel times and improving safety for people walking to stops.
The majority of those who took the neighborhood survey also indicated that they would support transit and safety improvements such as wider sidewalks or boarding islands at train stops, traffic signals that stay green longer for trains, dedicated transit lanes where there’s space for them and flashing “pedestrian crossing” signs at crosswalks.
Feedback received during this first round of outreach will help our project team develop initial proposals that we expect to share in the fall. We will then do another round of outreach and will use the feedback received to refine the proposals before we present them to our Board of Directors for approval, that we expect will be during the first half of 2023.
Other Efforts
While this project focuses on street-level transit improvements in the Ocean View neighborhood, it complements a long-range study called the Muni Metro Modernization Core Capacity Planning Study. This Planning study will develop concepts for providing subway-quality service on the M Ocean View outside the tunnel between West Portal and San Francisco State University as a part of a package of capacity-increasing and State of Good Repair improvements funded by a federal Capital Improvements Program (CIG) Grant.
Separately, a study of different design approaches for extending the M Ocean View from SF State to Parkmerced and developing infrastructure in this segment for running longer train cars is underway. While these other studies are on longer timelines and focus on different segments of the M Ocean View line than the M Ocean View Transit and Safety Project, our project team is coordinating with these various ongoing efforts as appropriate.