This Saturday, January 23, will be a big day for Muni and its riders — a lot of service is rolling out, along with a lot of smaller changes to better balance service. These changes will no doubt help thousands of people counting on Muni to get around. They could also be the last big round of service increases for a while, and there are still too many neighborhoods without service. We will continue to advocate at all levels, from San Francisco to Washington D.C., for more funding to bring back the service we need.

In the meantime, Muni is…

The coronavirus crisis has made it abundantly clear that public transit is an essential service. Over 100,000 people in San Francisco still rely on transit every day. Across the Bay Area, 31% of usual transit ridership is what we now call essential workers. Our entire system truly depends on public transit.

At the same time we need Muni to provide essential service, ridership has plummeted, fares have dried up, and there’s a gaping hole in the operating budget. …

Excellent public transit is key to a livable, accessible, sustainable San Francisco. The SFMTA budget that will be adopted this spring needs to focus on the city’s goals to put transit first, to improve equitable access for all riders and San Franciscans, and to continue to build a system that is easy and attractive to use so people can take transit rather than use private cars.

The SFMTA budget process is an opportunity for us to shape the future of transit in San Francisco. Budgets reflect what and who we choose to value in our city. …

San Francisco Transit Riders is developing and advocating for a Rapid Rider Network. We want to see a network of Rapid lines that reaches every neighborhood in San Francisco, that has skip-stop spacing, that arrives at least every 10 minutes, running end-to-end across the city in 30 minutes by 2030.

After several months of outreach on the street, at workshops, and at community meetings, we are ready to push for Rapid service on three lines: riders want the 22 Fillmore and the 29 Sunset to have overlaid Rapid service (a 22R and a 29R). The T Third is supposed to…

San Francisco Transit Riders is developing and advocating for a Rapid Rider Network. We want to see a network of Rapid lines that reaches every neighborhood in San Francisco, that has skip-stop spacing, that arrives at least every 10 minutes, running end-to-end across the city in 30 minutes by 2030.

After several months of outreach on the street, at workshops, and at community meetings, we are ready to push for Rapid service on three lines: riders want the 22 Fillmore and the 29 Sunset to have overlaid Rapid service (a 22R and a 29R). The T Third is supposed to…

It’s time to upgrade the train control system. Let’s stop wasting money on obsolete technology and parts. Stop wasting riders’ time with delays. Improving light rail, and transit priority, will be difficult at best if we don’t upgrade our train communication system.

Riders are tired of being stranded by Muni’s light rail service. Why does it seem like service has gotten more unpredictable? What’s so difficult about getting trains to run on time? We’ve heard that the old LRV3 Breda trains are getting harder to maintain, and harder to find parts for. We’ve heard about mechanical issues with the new…

San Francisco is blessed with talented people itching for a chance to help make things better. It seems like we should be able to solve all our problems if we could just get these people together in the same room with the right resources. Fortunately, many such folks were interested in spending a Saturday together to work on solving public transit.

The advocates of San Francisco Transit Riders got the opportunity to partner with the American Planning Association (APA) during their annual conference. The APA planned a Data Jam to bring planners together with civic hackers to see what the…

We have a broken train system in San Francisco. We’ve invested untold dollars in having dedicated tracks, a subway, and of course train cars. Yet the trains move slowly; they don’t arrive regularly, either arriving all at once or not for ages; travel time is slow and unpredictable; they’re frequently packed beyond capacity or else practically empty.

It doesn’t make sense to have this substantial infrastructure investment that just doesn’t work. So how do we fix it? At a recent meeting of close to 30 transit riders, we started by listing out the challenges.

Street-level service isn’t prioritized

• Tracks are…