(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 586: SF Muni to the Future

This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by SFMTA Director of Transportation Julie Kirschbaum. She discusses making system improvements, rising customer satisfaction, lessons from the pandemic on ridership and operations, as well as Muni’s cultural connection to the city.

You can listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA.

You can also find it and every previous episode in our archives.

Below is a full AI generated transcript, unedited but still quite good.

My first job out of college was working for a really small company that- Did all sorts of design solutions for people with disabilities, and through that I got connected with this incredible project on how to design sidewalks and trails for people with disabilities, and that was really how I learned about the transportation industry.

And after a couple of years, Muni was just starting a system study where they were looking at every aspect of the service, and I was really, really interested in the project to the point that the service planning manager at the time helped recruit me to manage that project, and it really kind of has bloomed into a almost 20-year career at the SFMTA for me.

What’s the difference maybe between then and now?

I think also because of our innovative model, we were able to attract some really passionate and creative active transportation planners that were just starting in the industry then. So when I first started in transportation, bike and pedestrian planners were pretty scrappy. You know, they, they tended to be advocates or people who started out really looking at- the work from a, a user perspective and then spent most of their career trying to convince traditional engineers, you know, why, why this work was important.

I think that’s completely different than today where people are going to engineering and planning school to deliver this vision of a, you know, multimodal transportation network

And we’re really proud that people are using the system, and it’s delivering what they need, and we’re excited to take it to the next level.

that’s the only way she knows how to get around. But we take the F line to school every day. It picks us up at 24th and, and Church on its way out of the yard, and she loves it. And the driver’s the same every day because it’s always the same person pulling out of the yard. So it’s actually been a way to, and I know parents will understand this, but, like, trying to get your kids out of the house in the morning can be really difficult.

But I, if I tell her, “Hey, we’re gonna be late. We’re gonna miss the F,” or, “Hey, we’re gonna be late. We’re gonna miss Juan,” or, “We’re gonna miss Renee. We’re, we’re missing the train,” she’s like, “Okay, I gotta go. I gotta get on the train.” And so it gives us kind of a structure to our morning, which is really great.

The worm has always been popular, obviously, but just, like, that crossover between the culture of the city but also, like, the agency that provides rides for so many people. And so I’m wondering if you can speak a little bit to that connection between the city itself and the agency, kind of like what’s been happening with SF City FC.

The cable car is the only moving national monument, and we’re really proud of that.

And so what’s going on to, like, improve the, the operations of the cable car and maybe fix some things that are getting older?

You cannot go to Home Depot and buy, you know, X, Y, or Z part that you need to maintain the system. So that often means fabricating or restoring in place. Also, thanks to the incredible leadership of Dianne Feinstein, the entire cable car system was rebuilt in the mid ’80s. And also, it was rebuilt in the mid-’80s, you know, which is now 40 years.

And so we are starting to think again about how we make that same level of investment so that the next 40 years of riders can also enjoy the system. A big step towards that was some work that started the initial planning during COVID, which was to, uh, replace the… They’re called sheaves, but they’re basically, like, the size of an intersection.

And that is just the incredible work by our shops, and they couldn’t go buy new sheaves. They don’t exist. And fabricating them to the original quality would be near impossible. But rebuilding them is helping to ensure that one of the most complex parts of the cable car system is now back to a state of good repair.

They’re just putting them together, and it’s pretty impressive how they’re able to, to do that. This is not something you’d usually ask a transit agency to do, right?

You mentioned the pandemic. It was interesting to see folks like Jarrett Walker on social media discussing a dislike for a comparison to, like, pre-pandemic ridership when we’re in a different world now. But ultimately, he believes, and I think I probably mirror this, is that we should be striving for more.

Do you think that the pre-pandemic comparisons are a reasonable benchmark for thinking about where we are in terms of our ridership journey?

There’s also places where we know the same number of people are riding, but just riding less, and the recovery story, I think, is, is still underway. So I am much more interested in how we are meeting the needs of today’s riders, how we are supporting economic recovery and our affordability and climate goals than looking at, you know, some number from six years ago and seeing how we match up to it.

So it’s interesting to frame it from that time period, uh, but also think about the future.

Uh, tho- those are the, those are the stories and the things that I’m interested in learning more about and- Yeah … and leveraging.

And then also, like, how are we gonna get there? ‘Cause we don’t have a car, so that’s a big consideration, I think, for a lot of parents, is, like, where Muni is and where the school is that their child is gonna go to. I’m interested to see what happens with the rethinking of the system that they use to assign kids schools, the lottery system, in the next couple years.

Um, but Muni plays into that, and also plays into, like, the morning traffic and afternoon traffic of the city overall, I imagine.

I’m interested in that kind of story because it’s interesting to think about then and now, and this is different than that ridership discussion. It’s more, like, operations and thinking about kind of what agencies are set up to do well or, or maybe what, uh, is harder for us, the city, just generally.

COVID allowed us, uh, the space to try a lot of different things. Some worked better than others, and being willing to stick with what was working and walk away from or have some clear parameters for calling it on things that were not working was a big part of our success. We really, I think, also used the fact that we had to so significantly change the way our system looked during COVID to bring service back in a much more deliberate way.

Prior to COVID, we really had more service on paper than we were set up to deliver every day, and that was essentially represented a broken trust with our customers because if we could fill all the trips on a route each day, you might have a 20-minute wait time. But on a bad day, you might wait 40 or 50 minutes.

But if, if you have to get to your job or an appointment or school, you’re planning that extra time whether you end up needing it or not, and so it can be really frustrating. So it was hard, and we had a, a lot of really strong policymaker support. But bringing back the service only at the pace where we could hire operators to deliver every single trip Was a huge key to our success, and then trying new things like new transit lanes, using technology instead of a traditional paper schedule to deliver the service, shutting down the subway early one week every quarter so that we could do all the hard maintenance jobs, all proved to be key to our success.

But underlying all of that was just not being overextended.

What we found through our Fix It Week program is that we could take that same concept of overnight work, but instead of having 45 minutes to an hour of work time, you know, we could get hundreds of, of labor hours in just a very short time period by having an eight-hour work window instead of a three-hour work window by bringing all of our day crews to work overnight.

And by planning out the work so that every part of the tunnel, and the stations, and the fan rooms all have work going on simultaneously. It’s been a great opportunity for us to do proactive maintenance work on our infrastructure, which mirrors what we do on our buses. But because our buses are modular, it’s always been a little bit easier to plan that.

This is one place that I do like to look back before COVID. We are having 60 to 70% fewer breakdowns of the subway because of this program and because of the reliability of our new trains, and that is, I think, one of the key reasons that our customers feel that they can really trust the system.

At the time, Twitter was such a big deal that when it failed, there was a whale, and it was getting pulled up by birds, right? Fail whale. And so somebody had taken a Muni train and put it underneath the birds, and so when the, when the meltdowns would happen, this icon would come up i- in Twitter, and, and I think a lot of folks were frustrated because it happened so many times.

And so it does feel better now. I don’t remember recently any times where people are like, “Oh, man, it’s, you know, we’re doing it over and over again like we did before.” And so it’s nice to know that it’s better than it was before. Do we tout wins enough, though? I know for me, like, I talk to folks all over the country and all over the world about transit agencies and, and things that are happening, and good things, and then also the things that are kinda rough.

Costs for building new big projects is, is tough. So many agencies that aren’t doing e- enough to serve riders. There’s funding shortages and things like that. But I’ve noticed, like, here in San Francisco that, um… and I’m really happy about this, but nobody seems to talk about it, is, like, we’re repaving our roads, right?

Like, I know that in my neighborhood i- in Noe Valley, like, it seems like all the roads have been repaved recently, and so it’s kinda nice to ride a bike as opposed to before. And so I’m wondering if we, if we tout those wins enough, where we’re doing the little things that make a difference in people’s lives every day, but they just, they’re not something that’s gonna show up on the news because, oh, you know, 24th Street got repaved.

That’s like, it’s not gonna get on KRON4 or whatever, but it matters to everybody else

Staying relevant to the news cycle is, you know, probably more art than science, and it’s something we are learning as we go. Uh, when we first started doing Fix-it Week and we would ask the maintenance staff for photos, you know, we would get photos of this, you know, really complicated infrastructure and, you know, all these, like, wires that they had spent hours working on, and there would be no people in the pictures.

You know, and, and what we quickly realized is the interesting story is the incredible dedication and hard work of our maintenance teams that are keeping this very old infrastructure up and going and how passionate they are so that customers don’t have those breakdowns. And so, you know, the fact that we now have an entire infrastructure team that is comfortable with a, you know, camera team coming in every Fix-it Week and documenting their work, I think is us sort of building that muscle of sharing and celebrating and explaining.

But there is always more that you can do because it’s always gonna be more interesting, the failures than the successes. And so we really wanna make sure that the successes, and there are so many of them, are also getting the attention.

You know, my wife and I, we go back to China last couple years every year to visit and see all the infrastructure that’s been built, right? And coming home, it’s always like, “Oh, well, why don’t we have 17 subway lines like Shenzhen?” And I know parts of the reasons why. I’ve been talking about it for 13 years, obviously.

But I’m wondering, like, why it’s taking so much effort and, and hard work to get, like, the Central Subway to, like, North Beach when we already have a tunnel there, or why we can’t just have, like, a tunnel boring machine in the ground at all times, and it’s something that I think a lot of ad- advocates and crayonistas would like.

But I’m curious about that process for thinking about the long term, and you were at the CTA as well, but, like, thinking about that long-term process of building out the network, because still, we have a lot of work to do to get people from one side of San Francisco to another in a reasonable amount of time.

And, you know, this is a well-traveled city. A lot of hands go up. And the, really the underlying reason is that in those countries, transit is funded by the federal government, and it is looked at as a key driver of economic growth, and climate sustainability, and affordability. Even states like Illinois, or New York, or Pennsylvania, or Minnesota, you know, where the state government is making a huge investment in transportation.

And in California, we’ve largely left transit funding to the counties, and as a result, uh, it’s a lot of pressure on the local tax base to fund and support the system, and it also creates multiple systems which you might not have in an area with a different funding structure.

Um, I asked Madhu about, like, whether we can sell carbon credits, and it, it turns out we can’t. That’s not a part of the carbon trade program. But, like, places like Chongqing in China, like, they were able to sell, like, a million dollars worth of credits a year to their national system, uh, in order to get funding for operations.

And so… Or, you know, can we set up a charge, a charging network in the city that actually the profits from that go back into funding Muni or SFMTA or TOD, and thinking about the land plus transportation model in Hong Kong, just, like, all of these different ways that you can think about doing innovative financing because we don’t have that federal support.

Is that something that Muni’s been thinking about?

So it’s not so much that I wish there was something that people would ask us, but that people would frame things a little bit more like what they’re experiencing rather than jumping to what they think is the answer. So,

Like that kind of like thing-

Because I, I imagine if you can be brought a bunch of problems, then you can coordinate a solution that’s larger than just that individual problem.

And the more people, I think, that understand the interconnected nature of our work, I think the better.

They said, “Oh, you, you kind of punch above your weight.” And I was really proud of that. I mean, I think that’s absolutely true. There are not a lot of, you know, 800,000-person cities that have made the investment in transit that we have, that have 50 miles of protected bike lanes. We are leading in North America and also looking to all of our international peers to keep pushing the envelope.

Our bicycle network is 470 miles, but to get to a point where everybody is comfortable in that system, eight-year-old to 80 is kind of how we think of it, we have some key gaps that we have to close, and we have to continue to expand on that investment.

We have so many different modes than we had 20 years ago. We have scooters, and we have e-bikes, and we have docked bikes, and we have, uh, delivery vans of all kinds. We have Waymos. We have just the landscape of the street is way different than it was before.

Because we’re a dense urban area, we are always going to be looking to make biking and walking and rolling and transit easy options, but we also care deeply about people that are driving and want safety to be at the forefront of all of our work. When I took over this role, I was really surprised that some of the most meaningful conversations I had is when I was just talking about being a mom in San Francisco and, you know, not being a transit rider or a biker or a w- you know, driver ’cause most people use a little bit of everything, even people who, you know, don’t have cars.

I think you said your family doesn’t have a car. You, you s- I still drive

But it changes my perspective about what’s safe and what’s not safe, or how we should mana- you know, manage getting somewhere, right? Like, what, how much time does it take? What do we need to take? Like, all, all the, the diaper bags and the, the accoutrement that goes with parenting, right? And so it’s a different calculation, and it makes you think a little bit more about the choices that you make, about where you’re going, how you get there, um, what you need to bring, all those things.

And so I think there’s a, there’s a different calculus that’s out there. And, and it, and there’s a different calculus for everybody who lives in a different part of the city and have different goals and needs. And as somebody who would love to have, like, a Dutch-style city with a lot of transit and a Shenzhen subway, like, I understand the need for getting around in other ways.

Yeah, yeah. Um, her and her friends feel very, very comfortable in a Waymo, you know, which is something that would’ve seemed like, you know, uh, science fiction when I was growing up. Um, and it’s just really fun to see how independent and how much earlier kids become independent in San Francisco because they have so many ways to get around.

They’re not having to drive their kids everywhere. They’re not having to worry about, like, whether they’re gonna be able to get to their things on time ’cause they can take care of the- themselves when they’re old enough, right? And so they have freedom, and we have a little bit more freedom, and everybody’s maybe happier.