Talking Headways Podcast: What San Francisco’s Muni Learned from COVID

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

Listeners can enjoy the audio with the player embedded below, scroll a little further for a partial edited transcript or peruse an AI-generated transcript of the entire episode.

Jeff Wood: Muni was at the front of a lot of innovation during the pandemic across the country, and I’m curious, since you were on the front lines of that, if there’s anything that you or your agency learned specifically from that time period, about what transit agencies can do, what they can’t do — or what we tell ourselves that we can or can’t do.

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 about operations and thinking about what agencies are set up to do well — or what is harder for us just generally.

Julie Kirschbaum: We learned to learn, I think. COVID allowed us 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 — things that were not working, was a big part of our success. We really 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 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 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.

Jeff Wood: Can you tell me a little bit more about that maintenance? The system is old. It’s been around a long time. There’s a lot of little things that can go wrong or need fixing before they do go wrong, and so I’m curious about that process of going in and making sure the system is maintained so you’re not having a computer that could operate Pong on it operating the subway.

Julie Kirschbaum: In a typical weekday night, our window to do maintenance is only about two and a half to three hours long. And then, if you add into that the amount of time it takes to safely power down the system so you can do the work and then have time to power it back up, that two and a half to three hours becomes 45 minutes to an hour, and 45 minutes to an hour is not a lot of time to do deep maintenance work.

We found, through our Fix It Week program, that we could take that same concept of overnight work, but instead of having 45 minutes to an hour of work time, we could get hundreds 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.