Castro Avoids Major Service Cuts in Citywide Changes to Muni Routes

By Xander Piper

While many City residents might be wary about the Dec. 5 changes to the Muni timetables, the Castro looks like it will narrowly escape the worst.

The service cutbacks were taken to help ease Muni’s $129 million deficit. Some riders are frustrated that some lines are seeing shortened hours and line cancellations so soon after a fare hike. The changes have been made only with a thorough examining of data from the Transit Effectiveness Project (TEP), which has been collecting data on all the routes and their peak hours.

“We looked at TEP over the course of the last fiscal year and it provided us the best data we had and also through its extensive community outreach. We heard quite a bit about people and their individual routes,” said Judson True of the Municipal Transit Agency (MTA). The brochure released by the MTA says that this is the first comprehensive assessment and evaluation of Muni service in a generation. The data collected by the TEP is available on the MTA website.

Of the major bus routes in the Castro area, the 22 and 24 will be completely unaffected, as will the Muni train lines, although the segment of the N-Judah between Embarcadero station and the Caltrain Station will be unavailable on weekends and holidays. The 33, 35, and 71 will also see their owl service cut and the 7 bus, which services all of Haight Street, will be completely discontinued.

“We heard some objections but we also heard objections to people seeing empty buses driving past their houses at night,” True said discussing the shortened service hours on the 33 and the 35 lines.
One concern citywide is that compressed hours, and hence more crowded vehicles, could lead to a rise in criminal activity on Muni. A passenger riding Muni's J-Church line was stabbed by a stranger on Nov. 30 at Church and Market streets, an allegedly unprovoked incident similar to an attack in September on an 11-year-old boy riding a Muni bus.

In a meeting on Muni crime called by Supervisor Bevan Dufty on Nov. 23, the new head of Muni security, Deputy Police Chief John Murphy, described how law enforcement on buses and trains would change. While the SF police have been required to spend a portion of their shifts on buses and trains, in the past it has been carried out at the discretion of the individual officers in a fairly sporadic way, monitored only by the swiping of their translink cards on buses. The Compstat program (computerized statistics) that has been monitoring and charting criminal activity throughout the city is now being used to more systematically plan on which lines and times to deploy officers, in both uniform and plain clothes. It is also hoped that this will help discourage fare dodgers that cost MTA an estimated $19 million annually in lost fares.

Functional safety continues to be another concern. An L-Taraval train derailed on Nov. 17. While no one was injured the line was out of commission for a full twelve hours. It was determined that no repairs were required on the tracks themselves and no cause for the derailment has yet been found.

Copyright 2009 Castro Courier