Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

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From what I understand, the grants to restore the old railcars don't come from their general funds (and if they decided not to do them, they wouldn't get the money). But I'm sure a lot of the regular maintenance comes out of their regular budget, and I agree that's a difficult thing to justify.

I wish they could do something about fare evasion. I ride Muni fairly often (both buses and trains), and I see maybe 20% of people paying when they get on. I know some of the remaining 80% probably have monthly passes or something and don't strictly need to tag on, but I can't imagine it's a large percentage. Biggest offenders seem to be out-of-towners who are going to Chase Center or Oracle Park events (I live in the Dogpatch and see a lot of that on event days). There's no excuse now that the fare terminals accept NFC credit cards too (and not just Clipper cards). I expect getting more people to pay could solve some of these funding problems, or at least make them less severe.

(I do wonder if the cost of fare enforcement exceeds what they'd recover in fares, though...)

I couldn’t find any documents on percentage of riders by payment method, but [1] says that in 2025 they actually got $14M more in fares than they budgeted for, partially because of “increased ridership that is paying full — or close to full — fares.”

Looking at the list of options on [2], your observed 1-in-5 Clipper taps seems within the realm of plausibility; there are a lot of ways to pay for Muni that aren’t visible to fellow passengers. In particular, out-of-towners who plan to ride Muni a lot are likely to get a MuniMobile (or, for the old-fashioned, paper) pass; and a ticket to any Chase Center event also counts as a Muni day pass. You also mentioned monthly passes (I know a lot of people who get them from their company’s commuter benefits), and there’s also transfers: not only are “single ride” fares valid for 2 hours, but if you board after 8:30pm you can’t tap again, because Clipper can’t handle it and you’ll be double charged!

[1] https://www.sfmta.com/projects/paying-your-fares-keeps-us-mo... [2] https://www.sfmta.com/getting-around/muni/fares

>I wish they could do something about fare evasion.

Reminder that vast majority of the fare is covered by taxes (Roughly 87%). I wish they just funded the remaining 13% instead.

It might not even cost that much more considering all of the expenses involved with hiring more staff (Salary/healthcare/pensions etc.) to collect the last 13 cents on the dollar.

This doesn't feel like the right way of thinking about it---if you went from 20% of people paying fares to 80%, that's 4x the revenue with the same fixed costs, and farebox recovery goes from 13% to 52%. Now, I don't think compliance is actually that low, but the point is that you shouldn't think of fares as collecting a fixed share of the operating costs.

The costs may be fixed but so is ~87% of the revenue via tax money.

Muni can be 100% free without increasing taxes too. The people using public land to store their private vehicles are not paying their fair share. Proper parking pricing and enforcement could easily pay for Muni’s deficit.

Yes, money is fungible. But why should it be that people who park cars on the street need to pay their fair share but people who ride Muni don't need to pay anything?

To incentivize the people taking their cars to use the bus instead!

Sure, but then it's not about a "fair share" any more; it's about incentivizing specific behaviors.

It's both. Why should the public 100% subsidize private vehicle storage in vast swaths of the city (And greatly undercharge when it's paid), but not public transit?

SF has some of the most valuable private[1] and public land in the US. Why is it so pressing to charge the last 13¢ on the dollar for a Muni rider, but not for drivers to pay for the public space they're storing their property on?

[1] Private land owners know this, which is why they charge a lot to use their parking garages/parking lots in SF.

The proposal was to charge for public street parking so we can make Muni free. That's not (at least not obviously) a "fair" allocation, it's just a transfer from one group to another. I agree that it's bad for street parking to be free, I just don't think it's necessarily the best use of funds from that to make transit free. If you're spending on transit, why not spend the money on expanding service instead?

> The proposal was to charge for public street parking so we can make Muni free.

My proposal is to make Muni free full stop. Via taxes is fine with me, I provided another way that doesn't necessitate that. We are already paying for the vast majority of each Muni trip from taxes.

>That's not (at least not obviously) a "fair" allocation, it's just a transfer from one group to another.

You're saying we're just transferring from one group to another, well SF was built for people before cars became commonplace, with excellent public transit before it was torn out for cars. I'm arguing that some of that needs to be transferred back to the people for better use (Bigger sidewalks, bike lanes, restaurant parklets etc.)

>If you're spending on transit, why not spend the money on expanding service instead?

Expanding service is great, but you'd be hard pressed to pay for it via parking meters/tickets and it costs even more to run a system on top of that, particularly the metro system.

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