Muni Improvements Draw Increased Ridership

Muni Improvements Draw Increased Ridership
By Kate McCarthy

Buses driving towards downtown on Geary Boulevard.

38 Geary buses zip downtown on new transit lanes that improve travel times for Muni riders.

As Earth Day approaches and we think about how to encourage more people to take non-car trips, recent Muni improvement projects are drawing increased ridership across the city. While Muni ridership downtown has not yet rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, ridership has gone up on Muni lines where we have improved speed and frequency of Muni service.

Muni is a lifeline for many of our riders: 70% of Muni riders have an annual income of less than $50,000. As we restored and added Muni service after the start of the pandemic, we invested in the routes that serve people who rely on transit and need it most. For example, after we installed transit lanes, increased frequency and re-routed the 22 Fillmore to bring people to their jobs and medical appointments in Mission Bay, ridership increased to 107% of pre-pandemic levels on weekdays and 118% on weekends.

Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve implemented more than 21 miles of new transit priority lanes, growing our transit lane network (https://ift.tt/dyMYueI) to over 70 miles. These transit lanes are improving travel times for Muni riders across the city. After transit lanes were installed on Mission Street in downtown, travel times on the 14 Mission and 14R Mission Rapid are now 31% quicker.

Ridership numbers on the 49 Van Ness-Mission also blossomed to 109% of pre-pandemic ridership on weekdays and 114% on weekends after construction on the Van Ness BRT corridor was completed last April. With physically-separated transit lanes and transit signal priority that gives the green light to Muni and Golden Gate Transit buses, riders there are seeing travel times reduced by 35%.

A similar story has emerged on San Francisco’s busiest transit boulevard — Geary. Like other lines that serve downtown, the 38 Geary hasn’t fully recovered to pre-pandemic ridership levels. But the route did nab a spot in the top 10 highest recovered routes in the Muni system. The 38 Geary’s 36,000 daily riders have recently seen travel time savings of up to 18% since we installed three miles of new transit lanes, bus stop changes and other improvements as part of the Geary Rapid Project. We plan similar improvements on the western end of the corridor as part of the Geary Boulevard Improvement Project.   

Muni riders have noticed that improvements to our busiest Muni lines are making service faster and more reliable than it has been in decades. Two-thirds (66%) of Muni riders who took our Annual Muni Rider Survey last fall rated Muni service as “good” or “excellent” — a 9% increase from 2021 and the strongest increase since 2018.

These improvements can’t come soon enough. Most of San Francisco’s greenhouse gas emissions come from cars and trucks. As the urgency to address climate change mounts, so does the need to get the most out of our Muni system. To inspire riders to come back to Muni, we’re working hard to bring back the Muni system our city deserves: One that is thriving with the better frequency, improved reliability and better connections that these projects are delivering.

Published April 21, 2023 at 02:24AM
https://ift.tt/rKHxJ8v

Comments

Vaccine nationalism will not shorten COVID pandemic, warns WHO chief https://ift.tt/3oqykEN

The World Health Organization (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has called for solidarity in the rollout of future coronavirus vaccines. In a video address at the opening of the three-day World Health Summit in Berlin, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus noted that it was natural for the countries to want to protect their own citizens first but, he urged, "we must also use it effectively".

New top story from Time: Pfizer-BioNTech Have Started Testing Their COVID-19 Vaccine in Children Under 12

https://ift.tt/3vWOQjL Alejandra and Marisol Gerardo are nine years old but already making a little bit of history. The twin sisters are among the first young children to get vaccinated with a COVID-19 shot in Pfizer-BioNTech’s study of its vaccine in kids under age 12. Alejandra and Marisol had their blood drawn in the morning on March 24, then got their first dose of the two-dose vaccine later that afternoon. “Their primary concern was, ‘is it going to hurt,’” says their father, Dr. Charles Gerardo, chief of emergency medicine at Duke University School of Medicine. “They’re not too worried about the long term side effects; they’re looking at the moment, not the future.” Testing the vaccine in younger children will answer critical questions about how much immunity the shots can provide, and potentially give parents and education officials more confidence in re-opening schools. While it appears that younger children don’t get as sick with COVID-19 as older teens and adult...

New top story from Time: Schools Across the U.S. Are Already Switching Back to Remote Learning Amid COVID-19 Surge

https://ift.tt/3B8bWpt (ATLANTA) — A few weeks into the new school year, growing numbers of U.S. districts have halted in-person learning or switched to hybrid models because of rapidly mounting coronavirus infections. More than 80 school districts or charter networks have closed or delayed in-person classes for at least one entire school in more than a dozen states. Others have sent home whole grade levels or asked half their students to stay home on hybrid schedules. The setbacks in mostly small, rural districts that were among the first to return dampen hopes for a sustained, widespread return to classrooms after two years of schooling disrupted by the pandemic. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] In Georgia, where in-person classes are on hold in more than 20 districts that started the school year without mask requirements, some superintendents say the virus appeared to be spreading in schools before they sent students home. “We just couldn’t manage it with that much sta...

Black doctor dies of COVID-19 after racist treatment complaints https://ift.tt/3nR3RiK

A Black doctor who died battling COVID-19 complained of racist medical care in widely shared social media posts days before her death, prompting an Indiana hospital system to promise a “full external review" into her treatment.

New top story from Time: How the Giant Boat Blocking the Suez Canal Was Freed: Dredgers, Tugboats, and a Full Moon

https://ift.tt/39oSyJn The congregation of tugboats and dredgers that freed a skyscraper-sized container ship from Egypt’s Suez Canal on Monday had help from an extremely foreign body over the weekend: The moon. The recovery vessels took advantage of high spring tides around the full moon on Sunday to free the Ever Given, which had blocked Egypt’s Suez Canal for almost a week . Its partial refloating just before dawn on Monday drew cheers and foghorn blasts from the bridges of other vessels caught in the bi-directional snarl that had held up hundreds of ships and billions of dollars worth of cargo each day since March 23. Images on shipping trackers and reports from on the ground gave credence to the Suez Canal Authority’s (SCA’s) Monday afternoon announcement that the ship had been “fully refloated”, allowing for “restoration of the vessel’s direction so it is positioned in the middle of the navigable waterway”. As of Thursday evening, the Ever Given was headed for Gr...

Celebrate Pride in San Francisco: Looking Back and Moving Forward

Celebrate Pride in San Francisco: Looking Back and Moving Forward By Enrique Aguilar SFMTA Pride Parade contingent in 2022. San Francisco has long been at the forefront of the LGBTQIA+ movement in the United States, and Pride is an integral part of the city’s cultural fabric. On Sunday, June 25, Market Street will come alive during the SF Pride Parade. This year's theme, "Looking Back and Moving Forward," embodies the spirit of reflection, progress and unity. Staff from the SFMTA will be participating in the parade and are ready to come together to celebrate! Pride events are important to countless people. They offer a safe and accepting space where folks can express their true selves without fear or judgment. The celebration is a powerful reminder that everyone deserves acceptance and respect, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. Pride Month events also acknowledge the contributions and struggles of the LGBTQ+ community throughout history. From th...

New top story from Time: Non-Discrimination Protections Are Hugely Popular — Yet Far From Law

https://ift.tt/2OZHZWa This article is part of the The DC Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox every weekday. If you watched last week’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about an anti-discrimination bill to protect the rights of LGBTQ Americans, you’d have come away thinking the series of safeguards being discussed were deeply divisive and threatening to the lawmakers’ constituents, and especially young women who play sports. But a new poll of more than 10,000 Americans, released today, shows just the opposite: that non-discrimination policies are overwhelmingly popular by a 3-to-1 margin. The study, from the non-partisan Public Religion Research Institute, asked voters about “laws that would protect gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people against discrimination in jobs, public accomodation and housing.” Among all respondents, 76% said they supported such proposals , up 5 percentage points from when PRR...

New top story from Time: The Current COVID-19 Vaccine Card is Terrible. We Asked Professional Designers to Create a Better Version

https://ift.tt/3DmwDzK It’s hard to move through the modern world without carrying a full deck of personal cards with you: driver’s license, insurance card, credit cards, bank card, Medicare card, student ID card and more. They are the transactional visas of contemporary life and they’ve been designed with that role in mind—durable, portable, easy to use, hard to forge. The newest addition is the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s COVID-19 vaccination card—and it violates almost every rule of good design: it’s made of perishable paper; it’s too big to fit in most wallets; it’s entirely analog—with small spaces for handwritten entries, which can be hard to read at best and entirely illegible at worst; it’s black and white and thus a cinch for forgers; it’s unencrypted—with information displayed on the face of the card rather than hidden in a QR or barcode—meaning that if you do misplace it, your health information is out in the world. What’s more, the card conne...

New top story from Time: The Livestream Show Will Go On. How COVID Has Changed Live Music—Forever

https://ift.tt/3wlsGrR For 383 days and counting, Sophie Hawley-Weld and Tucker Halpern have stuck to a routine. At 1:00 p.m., they suit up—sometimes in sweatpants, sometimes in tropical-print shirts and funky robes—and descend to the living room of their Miami home, flick on the cameras for their livestreams to Instagram, Facebook and Twitch , and begin playing a DJ set. The pair, better known as Grammy-nominated electronic act Sofi Tukker , have not missed a day, although sometimes they ask their friends to guest star instead. The livestream sessions average thousands of viewers. There’s an always-on Zoom room where their fans, who call themselves the Freak Fam, congregate. The Freak Fam—an eclectic, international bunch—have set up their own Discord server and an Instagram account, and talk often on the Facebook group and Twitch chat associated with Sofi Tukker, congregating as a community outside of the stream. Sofi Tukker livestream viewers have met up, started dating, ...

Gene Henderson: Honoring Muni’s First Black Division Manager

Gene Henderson: Honoring Muni’s First Black Division Manager By Jeremy Menzies In recognition of Black History Month, we bring you the story of Gene Henderson, the first Black man to become the head of a Muni bus division, Muni’s Kirkland Division. Henderson’s Background Gene Henderson was born in Houston, Texas, in 1916. He married his wife Naomi in 1939 and then served in the U.S. Army during World War II. Following the war, Gene and his family moved to San Francisco where he began his career at the San Francisco Municipal Railway. Early Career On February 1, 1946, Henderson was hired as a streetcar motorman out of Sutro Division, which was located on the corner of 32nd Ave. and Clement St. He was hired just five years after Muni’s first Black transit operator, Audley Cole, had successfully fought to integrate the carmen’s union in 1941. In his early days at Muni, Gene worked one of the three lines running out of Sutro Division from the Ferry Building to the Richmond District o...

My precise view

Search This Blog