Editor’s note: This story is part of Governing’s ongoing Q&A series “In the Weeds.” The series features experts whose knowledge can provide new insights and solutions for state and local government officials across the country. Have an expert you think should be featured? Email Web Editor Natalie Delgadillo at ndelgadillo@governing.com.San Francisco’s fortunes have shifted dramatically in the last half-decade, pinballing between a citywide affordability crisis and acute concerns about public safety and vacancy in the downtown area brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s also been a tumultuous time for mobility in the Bay Area, with big ridership losses and fiscal crises at the region’s public transit agencies and the advent of autonomous taxis in San Francisco.
Jeffrey Tumlin, the outgoing director of transportation at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), has had a front-row seat for the churn. The SFMTA operates buses and subways within San Francisco — a transit operation known locally as Muni — while also overseeing city streets and planning for walking, biking and driving infrastructure.
Tumlin is a longtime San Francisco resident and former director of strategy at Nelson\Nygaard Consulting Associates, an international planning firm. He took on the job at SFMTA after starting and leading the Oakland Department of Transportation. He started the job just a few months before the pandemic began, and completed his five-year contract at the end of last year. Before leaving the job, Tumlin spoke with Governing about managing a dense city transportation network, handling new transportation technology, and rebuilding the finances of public transit. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Governing: You started in this role at SFMTA right before the pandemic started. What did you think you were going to be able to do at this post prior to the onset of the pandemic?
First of all, I didn’t want this job. In order to recover from the experience at Oakland DOT I made the mistake of going on an intensive, 10-day meditation retreat. At some point during which I realized I love consulting, and I was very good at it, but you don’t have responsibility when you’re consulting. I realized that it was time for me to serve in a deeper capacity. So I told the SFMTA board members, fine, I will take this job, and they didn’t believe me. They made me promise out loud, twice, that if I took the job that I would commit to staying for the full five years of the contract. And of course, this was three months before lockdown. There were times during some of the worst days of COVID where I had to remind myself that I had made a promise to serve for five full years.
SFMTA is sort of unique in that it’s public transit, but it’s also streets and parking and some other things. What does that combination of responsibilities allow someone in your post to do?
Well, it meant that during COVID we could strike over 20 miles of streets and do transit-only lanes. Being responsible for all mobility and managing the entire right of way means that it’s a lot easier for us to think through the trade-offs necessary to make the entire transportation system work. Because we manage cars and bikes and buses and trains and pedestrians, we can sort out the tensions, for example, between the bikeway network and the transit-priority streets.
We can also very skillfully plan for the future. A lot of the challenge of being in a transportation job is you have to simultaneously manage the transportation system for today while also building out the transportation system necessary to accommodate the future. Here in San Francisco that means our commitment to 82,000 new housing units. One of our challenges is how do we make sure that people can continue to drive when they need to drive? Ironically, that often means reprioritizing existing space on our roads to prioritize the most space-efficient modes of transportation. I need to make sure that for everyone who doesn’t need to drive, transit is faster, more frequent, more reliable, cleaner and safer. And I need to make sure that walking and biking are safer and more joyful for people of all ages and abilities. And that is because when I walk or bike or take the bus, I take up one-tenth of the roadway space that I do when I drive a car or take an Uber or a Waymo. Planning for the complex geometry of the city is a big part of our jobs. The tradeoffs that we have to deal with are inevitably controversial.
Your counterparts in other cities are often asking society at large to make those tradeoffs.
Yeah. And that’s why despite the fact that Muni has one of the worst financial impacts coming out of COVID, we are stronger than almost any of our other counterparts because we were able to quickly adapt during COVID particularly around transit speed, reliability, cleanliness and safety.
I do want to ask about the pandemic’s effect on revenue. Do you think SFMTA is going to be able to manage the fiscal cliff?
Yes, we are going to be able to rebuild the financial base of SFMTA. SFMTA, we’re an enterprise organization, and historically our main revenue sources have been transit fares, parking fees and fines. We get a fixed chunk of the city general fund. And then we get a bunch of state operating assistance. All four of those funding categories have been in decline. Parking revenue is far more important to us than transit fare revenue and our downtown parking garages have been in long-term decline largely due to Uber and Lyft. Business travelers don’t rent a car at [San Francisco International Airport] SFO to come to a convention in downtown San Francisco. Our parking garage revenue, and we have a 25 percent sales tax on private commercial parking, those revenues were steadily dropping pre-COVID, and then COVID tanked them when the downtown office core emptied out as a result of work-from-home. So we have to replace those parking revenues.
Setting aside the fiscal crises that have resulted from revenue losses, how else did the pandemic change the way you think about what public transit is going to be like in the future?
We pivoted very quickly during COVID. I think the lasting impacts will show up in a couple ways. One is culture. During the pandemic we all realized a few things. One is that working in a municipal government is deeply meaningful work. If you want to make a difference in climate or equity or safety or economic recovery, there’s no better place to do that than in a municipal transportation agency. So people were able to see just how meaningful our work is and that has helped a lot with morale. They also realized that we needed to adjust far more quickly than government agencies are designed to and fortunately, the emergency directive here in San Francisco effectively suspended all of the bureaucratic rules. So it trained staff in being phenomenally innovative and nimble and in taking risks, including making mistakes and then recovering from mistakes, and teaching others what you learned. Those are big, big cultural changes.
Courtesy of SFMTA
On the mechanical side, having what may well be the densest network of transit priority treatments — I don’t know this for sure but we have not been able to find another city of our tiny size that has matched us — the transit system is just so much faster and more reliable than it has been in anyone’s lifetime. That has changed travel patterns all over the city. In a city where our downtown subway station is at around 40-45 percent of pre-COVID ridership recovery, we have lines that are over 120 percent of pre-COVID ridership. The improvement in speed and reliability has changed the way San Franciscans think about transit, and it has meant that our public approval rating is the highest that it’s been since we started collecting data in 2001.
It wasn’t just COVID that changed things. You had Waymo and Cruise, the advent of autonomous taxis in the city. Can you talk a little bit about your perspective on the arrival of those things? You were very skeptical that they were ready for prime time.
Well that is a very long story. We started off with two autonomous vehicle operators. One of them we worked really hard to try to get them to do well in San Francisco, largely by trying to get performance data so that we can track their trends and try to establish a level playing field to allow the best autonomous vehicle providers to thrive in San Francisco and minimize the harm on the city of what still is a rapidly evolving technology. We’ve watched performance for Waymo continue to improve. Although obviously they still have challenges. They just drove into wet concrete two days ago. But in other ways they’ve made enormous strides in being able to operate safely in the complex streets of San Francisco, while minimizing unintended negative consequences. Their competitor, Cruise, really struggled and was taking greater and greater risks until ultimately the state regulators found them withholding critical reporting information around a specific safety incident that resulted in their suspension in California. That is disappointing to me. Cruise, which was founded here in San Francisco, should have had a path to success, if they had figured out how to be a better partner with cities and with safety regulators.
These types of services will eventually be in other places too, the way Uber and Lyft came from your neck of the woods to other parts of the country. What do you hope people learn from the rollout of these services in the Bay Area?
I wouldn’t recommend that anyone be the beta test site. What you want to do is let somebody else be the beta test site and then be a rapid follower so that you can take advantage of the upside of new technology while minimizing the downside. Our early experience with autonomous vehicles found a lot of downside. Particularly when vehicles would get confused, they would simply become immobilized wherever they happened to be and require a human to come rescue them. They would tend to get confused in the most critical bottlenecks in our transportation system — complex intersections with a lot of traffic, on our train tracks. The early experimentation with autonomous vehicles here in San Francisco significantly worsened the performance of the overall transportation system.
But that corner has been turned a little bit?
It has. The streets in San Francisco can handle a fair amount of chaos, and as a municipal partner what we want to do is make sure that new technology scales within a certain tolerance of chaos. Waymo has been fairly effective at scaling when they are ready. Again, we expect problems. It’s the transportation system. There are always problems and we can handle problems at a certain pace. But beyond that, it becomes disruptive to the transportation system and disruptive to the understaffed and underfunded municipal transportation department itself.
What we’re also seeing is that Uber and Lyft, both of which were founded in San Francisco, made an awful lot of promises around helping to reduce congestion, improve the efficiency of the roadway system, improve safety, and in actuality we’ve found the opposite. The thing we hope that mobility technology providers do is to not overstate their case. For many new mobility technologies, in order for them to make money, what they need to do is appeal to the convenience of the privileged, and oftentimes that comes at the expense of the efficiency of the transportation system as a whole. We remain concerned that autonomous vehicle companies will have the same negative impact on the overall transportation system performance as we saw from Uber and Lyft. Granted, I use all of these modes of transportation, because they are convenient. But if too many people avoid taking the bus, which can move 10 times as many people per square foot of road, then you end up in a situation where you have a lot of Ubers and autonomous vehicles that are stuck in traffic with nobody moving. There’s always this tension between user convenience and system efficiency, which is something we need to manage.
I heard you once say that San Francisco was the most conservative city you’d ever worked in. Obviously that’s not its reputation in most of the country. What kind of conservatism is it?
San Francisco is a beautiful city that is precious to all of us who live here, and for those of us who’ve lived here for any length of time, we’ve seen a lot of change. Most of that change was not necessarily for the better. So San Franciscans tend to be afraid of change and reluctant to accommodate change, even though working to preserve the status quo creates real problems. So that’s what I meant. We are progressive in our social values and very conservative when it comes to the city itself.
The broader cultural idea of San Francisco is kind of up for grabs too. How do things feel there at the moment?
I love being in San Francisco at the cusp between a bust and the next boom. This is always the best time to be in San Francisco. I’ve lived here for 35 years, so I’ve been through three boom-bust cycles. This is the best time to be in San Francisco, as it struggles to reinvent itself. And oftentimes in its boom cycle it invents what’s next for cities.
A good example of the split in San Francisco politics has to do with housing policy. There’s widespread agreement that protecting the people who live here, particularly the most vulnerable — low-income people, immigrants, seniors — we want to make sure that people are not evicted from their homes. But at the same time our reluctance to accommodate new housing production for so many decades is contributing to making the city deeply unaffordable. Our fear is that San Francisco is no longer a welcoming place to immigrants, to the next generation of weirdos and misfits that drive San Francisco culture. If it’s only affordable to the very wealthy or to people who win the affordable-housing lottery, then it just becomes a museum of itself. I think San Francisco is finally finding its way into a way of producing housing again that also protects vulnerable populations who are currently here.
I think we’ve also turned the corner a little bit in the transportation debates, where there’s been very little change in transportation for decades, and always a debate over the degree to which we should accommodate the convenience of motorists versus other users and versus roadway safety. We’re in the midst of what still feels like a cultural war in transportation where people assume that it’s zero-sum because our streets are not getting any wider, and we’re having to make choices and tradeoffs within the existing street right of way. That’s where this tension comes between accommodating the people who are here now versus accommodating the next generation of folks who are coming in, where we know we need to allow more people to move in streets of a fixed width. Again, the laws of geometry require that we do a better job investing in making transit fast and reliable and making walking and biking safe and joyful. That is the challenge.
Do you know what you’re doing next?
I’m taking a long break. My goal is at least six months.
