Ok the photos are cool and it's nice to see the vintage street cars. But Muni has a budget shortfall and is planning on cutting a bunch of bus lines and reducing frequency on lines across the system. Meanwhile, it has an internal supply chain to custom build replacement parts for vintage vehicles that no other city will operate, and teams of specialist restorers. Viewed in isolation, they look cool! Viewed in context, is this ... irresponsible?

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kelnos a day ago | parent | next [-]

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...)

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wolfgang42 a day ago | parent | next [-]

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

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ProfessorLayton a day ago | parent | prev [-]

>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.

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aesthesia a day ago | parent [-]

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.

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ProfessorLayton a day ago | parent [-]

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.

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aesthesia a day ago | parent [-]

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?

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fragmede a day ago | parent [-]

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

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aesthesia 10 hours ago | parent [-]

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

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ProfessorLayton 9 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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aesthesia 4 hours ago | parent [-]

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?

	▲	ProfessorLayton 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> 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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dam_jackalopes a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Depends on what value you place on the vehicles I suppose.

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kqgnkqgn a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The photos are really cool, and I do like trains and infrastructure in general.

But came here to say the same thing. There is an advertising campaign in SF right now to encourage people to vote to give Muni more money (again) in November, because they can't cover their essential costs. This...looks pretty non-essential to their core mission to me.

They should have done everything they can inside their org to cut costs, before going to ask residents to give them more money.

Now I hope - maybe this is primarily funded by donations / grants or volunteer work, and SFMTA contributes very little to this. If so great - but it would have been wise for them be very clear about that.

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tobiasdorge a day ago | parent [-]

I'm a member of Market Street Railway (https://www.streetcar.org/) which does a lot of advocacy to keep these street cars maintained. Many of these cars were either purchased long ago from other cities that would have otherwise scrapped them (most of the PCCs, the long sleek ones) and others are often either preserved Muni originals or donated / purchased by Market Street Railway. Car 162 just came back into service and was purchased by Market Street Railway and worked on by volunteers (and Muni) [1]

I obviously am I biased, and think this is very very cool. There are many intangibles here beyond the budget numbers; a bit of history, a bit of whimsy, a bit of color to what is often utilitarian (public transit). It certainly attracts tourists to the city (I was pretty surprised at the number of out of towners at Muni heritage weekend).

But I do think it's important, not just for tourism but also as a legitimate connector along the Embarcadero corridor that otherwise has no public transit along it. Agree that a breakout of the cost of maintaining these things would be appreciated, not sure if that exists in clear terms, but I don't think it's massive. For example Car 162 was damaged in a collision in 2014, and took 12 years to fix and return to service. For many gripmen / Muni restorationists working for the city, it's a side project.

And while I'm here, I'd be remiss if I didn't post an article about Maurice Klebolt, one of the biggest advocates for vintage transit in San Francisco. It describes how he acquired car 106 from the Soviet Union [2]

[1]: https://www.streetcar.org/streetcars/162-162-muni-1950s-live...

[2]: https://www.streetcar.org/remembering_a_trolley_titan/

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dang a day ago | parent [-]

Re https://www.streetcar.org/remembering_a_trolley_titan/: that would make a great HN submission in its own right! We should just let enough time go by so it doesn't count as a follow-up [1].

Would you be up for posting it in, say, a couple months and then email hn@ycombinator.com? We'll put it in the SCP [2] for sure, so it will get a random placement on HN's front page.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308

	▲	tobiasdorge a day ago \| parent [-]
		Sure; can do!

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convolvatron a day ago | parent | prev [-]

looks like the one time cost for doing a renovation is around $1m per car, and are funded by spot grants rather than the general budget. I was unable to find the overhead involved in ongoing maintenance, but it looks like killing the F line is already on the table.

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abeppu a day ago | parent [-]

Apparently the cable cars have by far the highest cost to operate per hour anyway.

At 2024 numbers in this SPUR report:

Cable car 872 streetcare 631 lightrail 412 system avg 327 motorbus 302 trolleybus 281

So canceling each cable car could IIUC, allow the system to add roughly 3 electric buses.

https://www.spur.org/sites/default/files/2026-03/SPUR_Taking...

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wolfgang42 a day ago | parent [-]

Note that Muni cannot legally reduce cable car service; the city charter[1] mandates a minimum level of service, due to a 1947 ballot proposition[2]. As your link notes:

> Cable cars are a symbol of San Francisco, a major tourist attraction, and an indelible feature of the city’s cultural and historical landscape. [...] While SPUR doesn’t recommend changing SFMTA’s role in cable car operations, the agency may wish to explore options to generate additional revenue from the cable car system or seek supplemental support from the city’s budget, given the outsized expense of providing cable car service and the unique value this mode brings to the city as a cultural attraction. SFMTA already acknowledges the special status of cable cars by pricing them differently from other modes and by excluding cable car service from some of its passes and fare discount programs.

Apart from that, I suspect the per-service-hour figure is particularly misleading for cable cars and removing one cable car from the schedule would free up significantly less than $871: there is a significant fixed overhead (from power usage and cable wear) to having the system running at all, regardless of how many cars are on it.

1: https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s... 2: https://www.cablecarmuseum.org/60th_Anniversay.html

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Animats a day ago | parent | next [-]

> there is a significant fixed overhead (from power usage and cable wear) to having the system running at all, regardless of how many cars are on it.

Each cable car trip costs Muni about US$20. They charge about $8.

I was amazed when I first found out how the grip worked. I figured they clamped pulleys around the cables and then applied brakes to the pulley system. Nah. It's brutally simple. They squeeze two soft metal plates around the cable. The cable wears a groove in the plates during starting and stopping. Those plates are replaced every 3-4 days. The cables are replaced every few months.

Plus the thousand or so pulleys under the street need regular attention. The whole system has way too many friction points, which means intensive maintenance.

The PCC streetcars were a really good design, built for efficient operation with modest maintenance. Their successor in San Francisco was built by Boeing Vertol, which totally botched it.[1] None of those cars are still around. The PCC cars roll on.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Standard_Light_Rail_Vehicle

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abeppu a day ago | parent | prev [-]

How about the reducing the F, which for a decent portion of its route down Market is directly above the underground KLM lines? The F is slower and lower capacity per car and stops at lights (and stops traffic when it needs to turn) in addition to apparently being more costly to run. I am clearly not a transit planner or traffic engineer, but it seems perfectly reasonable to run the F only from the Ferry Building to Fishermen's Wharf.

- People who want to go up market can transfer to the KLM at Embarcadero and if they're going to Castro (or maybe Church?) they may also get there faster.

- If tourists want to see an old-timey street car, they could ride one perhaps half the distance, only along the water with views Coit tower, and the eastern end of the line would be right by the Railway Museum anyway. And we could run perhaps half as many cars.

	▲	SllX a day ago \| parent [-]
		The part that runs on Market Street is the useful part. The part that runs along the Embarcadero isn’t useless, but it’s more seasonally useful. I’d rather see the old PCC cars replaced with a solid modern low-floor LRV using more standardized parts & aggressive transit policing to keep freeloaders from abusing the system. It is partially redundant with the subway, but if you’re going to have a surface street railway anyway, I’d rather it be optimized for local use. You could pull the J up from underground too using the same low-floor LRV model chosen for the new F, having it turn at Church & Market rather than making an awkward diversion to Church & Duboce first.