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M Bus Community Shuttle Starts Service Monday 5/4 By Erin McMillan Starting Monday, May 4, the M Bus will return to partial service as a “Community Shuttle” between Balboa Park and West Portal stations. This service update is based on ridership trends, staffing availability, and community feedback. It has strong support from District 11 Supervisor Safai as a way to improve transit connections in the southwestern area of the city. The modified M Bus Community Shuttle route will provide better access for essential trips in the Ocean View, Merced Heights and Ingleside neighborhoods and to the transit hubs of West Portal and the Balboa Park. Serving stops on weekdays only from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., the M Bus frequency will be approximately every 20 minutes. Since April 8, Muni has been operating a COVID-19 Core Service Plan to support essential trips that cannot be made any other way. With fewer operators, car cleaners and maintenance staff available during the shelter-in-place, Muni se

Muni inspired virtual backgrounds By Sophia Scherr Whether you’re telecommuting, teaching or learning online, or staying home and riding Muni for essential trips only - do it in style with these Muni virtual backgrounds. Download, save and use them for any of your preferred video chatting platforms. For the latest COVID-19 related transit updates please visit  SFMTA.com/COVID-19 .  Published April 29, 2020 at 02:37AM https://ift.tt/3cQpcTo

COVID-19 Ambassadors Help You Ride Muni Correctly By Mariana Maguire If you’re taking Muni for essential trips along Market Street you might see SFMTA’s yellow-vested Ambassadors wearing face masks or coverings and directing customers to maintain safe physical distance at curbside bus stops and boarding islands. What you can’t see are their smiles behind their masks as they work throughout the day to help San Francisco “flatten the curve.” COVID-19 Ambassadors at a bus stop on Market Street. Last week, the SFMTA launched our COVID-19 Ambassador Program. Although overall ridership is down, during peak times in certain areas we sometimes still see crowding at bus stops and on buses. If a bus is too crowded, our operators will stop picking up new passengers until there is enough room for more. We know that this and other changes are tough on everyone. That’s where our Ambassadors come in. Their aim is to encourage customers to practice good public health behavior throughout the entir

Budget Outreach and Engagement By The Coronavirus pandemic and current shelter-in-place order have changed our daily routines. The timeline for the SFMTA budget approval has been extended to August 1st. However, we are moving forward with the budget because we need a reference point for where the Agency intends to go. As such, we are taking steps to ensure we continue to engage in a thoughtful and comprehensive community process in light of the current circumstances.  If you would like to comment on the budget, please email sfmtabudget@sfmta.com , call 415.646.2222, or post on our  Facebook  page or  Twitter  using #sfmtabudget. You can also visit our  budget webpage.  The SFMTA Board of Directors will be voting on the budget during their regularly scheduled hearing on Tuesday, April 21st .  This is the fourth in a series of blogs exploring the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s (SFMTA’s) budget process and proposal for Fiscal Years 2021-2022. The first blog provided a

Slow Streets Program to Help With Social Distancing By With Muni service temporarily reduced during the COVID-19 health crisis, many San Francisco residents need to walk and take other modes of transportation to make essential trips. However, sometimes it is difficult to maintain 6’ of social distance on many sidewalks, park paths, and bikeways. This can be especially true when passing lines outside grocery stores and other essential services. Because of this, many pedestrians are choosing to walk in the street, exposing themselves to swiftly moving vehicle traffic. The SFMTA is implementing a new program, Slow Streets, to close some streets to through traffic and allow roadways to be used more as a shared space for foot and bicycle traffic. Throughout the city, corridors have been identified for Phase 1 Slow Streets. Beginning this week, some of these streets will be closed to through vehicle traffic to prioritize walking/biking and to provide more space for social distancing duri

Muni Updates: Restoring Some of Our Service By Erin McMillan Since April 8, Muni has been operating a COVID-19 Core Service Plan to support essential trips that cannot be made any other way. With fewer operators, car cleaners and maintenance staff available during the shelter-in-place, Muni service has been significantly reduced. Our initial network of 17 key lines was informed by our data on where ridership is highest, our Muni Equity Strategy to provide transportation for those with the fewest options, locations of essential services like hospitals and groceries, and to provide coverage across the city. Over the past week and a half, SFMTA has seen a small increase in the number of available key personnel, allowing us to expand our service based on ridership trends and public feedback during the pandemic. On April 25, we will be modifying Muni’s Core Service by adding back some modified routes and increasing the frequency of buses on others. This additional bus service was infor

A New Way Of Generating Prediction Times By The last month has brought about dramatic changes in virtually all aspects of our lives, including how we use our Muni transit system. When we implemented our Core Service Plan that focused our limited resources on 17 lines that were serving the majority of our customers, we also transitioned our service operation from a schedule-based system to a headway or frequency-based system. This means vehicles depart their terminals at regularly timed intervals instead of at specific times. In so doing, we also had to make adjustments on how this information was processed by NextMuni to generate reliable arrival time predictions. Up until now, if a Muni vehicle departed the terminal before its scheduled departure time, it would register on NextMuni as being on break and would not generate predictions, even though it was on its regular route. When we transitioned to a headway-based system, and as the buses experienced fewer delays on their routes,