2020 SFMTA Annual State of Good Repair Report
The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s (SFMTA) 2020 State of Good Repair Report provides an overview of the Agency’s rehabilitation and replacement needs and investments. It also outlines the Agency’s project prioritization, planning, and delivery practices related to maintaining a State of Good Repair and institutionalizing the practice of asset management.
This is the eighth comprehensive annual State of Good Repair Report published by the SFMTA. The Agency is committed to issuing this Report annually as a matter of best practices shared by transit agencies across the region, country, and world. The Report aims to track the progress of State of Good Repair investments and asset management practices compared to previous reporting periods. This document builds on previous State of Good Repair Reports and contains financial data and condition scores from the past few years.
Achieving a State of Good Repair requires an understanding of the desired performance of an asset and timely investment to maximize that performance over its useful life. The SFMTA owns and maintains an estimated $15.6 billion of capital assets in FY2019-20; including motor coaches, trolley buses, light rail vehicles, historic streetcars, cable cars, maintenance and administrative facilities, parking garages, active transportation infrastructure, and street signs and paint. With an annual budget of nearly $1.3 billion, the SFMTA must balance the needs of the transportation system between expanding capacity and reinvesting in existing infrastructure. The SFMTA has committed to investing an average of $250 million annually in State of Good Repair. This is a commitment made to the Federal Transit Agency (FTA) in 2010. In FY2019-20, the SFMTA spent $232 million on State of Good Repair investments that maintain or renew the Agency’s assets. This brought the Agency’s annual average investment since FY 2010 to $234 million per year continuing progress towards Agency’s $250 million minimum goal and commitment to the FTA.
This report also provides data on the condition of the SFMTA’s capital assets based on an FTA standard. The FTA’s Transit Economic Requirements Model Lite (“TERM Lite”) calculates a condition score on a scale of 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent). For FY2019-20, the value weighted condition scores for all Agency assets averaged 3.07. A score of at least 2.5 is required for the FTA to recognize a transportation system as being in a State of Good Repair. This score represents a decline of 0.11 from the reported value of 3.18 in the 2019 State of Good Repair Report. The model calculated these scores based only on the age of the assets reported, excluding other factors such as specific operating conditions and level of use that impact the assets’ condition. The Agency will continue its condition assessment program across all asset classes. As this data is collected, condition scores will be updated in our TERM Lite model to reflect the true condition of the assets more accurately.
Previous State of Good Repair reports have highlighted the need for the SFMTA to increase state of good repair investment, to prioritize investment in existing infrastructure, and to improve condition assessment activities and information sharing so all staff have a better understanding of our system’s condition and performance. Since the last State of Good Repair report was published, the Agency has taken steps to address our system’s urgent needs by creating an interdivisional Asset Management Working Group, initiated traffic signal and transit station condition assessments, and embedded state of good repair considerations into our budget process. However, the SFMTA still has work to be done to reach full asset management maturity and must continue to build asset management capacity while maintaining assets that are essential to delivering the services the public expects of the SFMTA.
