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Muni: All-Door Boarding Coming in 2012 New policy could improve on-time performance, but increase fare evasion TEXT SIZE A A A By ZUSHA ELINSON on September 6, 2011 - 5:31 p.m. PDT 6 Comments Zusha Elinson/The Bay Citizen Though a clipper card reader beckons, signs tell Muni riders not to board the backdoor. Muni officials said Tuesday that passengers will be able to board at any door on any bus line as soon as next year. Opening all the doors will speed up boarding at bus stops, and by extension, the often-late buses, said John Haley, director of operations. Muni's on-time performance sunk to 72.9 percent last quarter, well below the voter mandated 85 percent mark. Haley said that one study showed that boarding time was responsible for half of all bus delays on Market Street. Of course, anyone who rides Muni knows that bus drivers already allow all-door boarding at crowded bus stops. But technically, a rider could get a ticket for not getting on through the front door, and bus drivers don't open the back door at every stop. Under the all-door boarding plan, riders will need to use their Clipper card or have other proof of payment to board at the back door. Clipper card readers have already been installed at each bus door, but right now signs on bus windows declare: "STOP: Enter Through Front Door Only." Muni Chief Ed Reiskin said he favored the new boarding plan, but cautioned that the agency would have to plan for the possibility of more fare evasion through the back door. "The issue of how to do this with the right level of education and enforcement is the difficult part," said Reiskin. "What we don't want to do is spread the message that Muni is free now." Muni loses about $19 million each year to fare evasion. RELATED NoneMuni's Still Running Late and Shows No Improvement None'Poo Taboo': The Difficulty of Discussing Public Restrooms NoneSan Francisco Imposes 15 Mile Per Hour Speed Zone Around Schools Reiskin said the program could be impl

SFMTA Director of Transportation Ed Reiskin told the agency's board of directors yesterday that the earliest Muni could implement a system wide all-door boarding system would be sometime in the first half of next year. For years, transit advocates have been encouraging the agency to extend its all-door boarding policy on the city's light-rail fleet to all Muni buses to speed up service and save the agency money. It's one of the many relatively simple solutions that have been talked about to make Muni faster and more reliable. "Muni spends a whopping 20 percent of its time simply boarding passengers," said Mario Tanev of the San Francisco Transit Riders Union (TRU). "If riders could legally board at all doors, travel times would be shorter." At the request of SFMTA Director Joél Ramos, Transit Director John Haley presented this report on all-door boarding [pdf] at the SFMTA Board meeting. It points out the benefits, including reduced travel times across the system, a more convenient boarding experience for the rider and it would help prevent fare conflicts between operators and riders. "Most importantly for riders, it's quicker trips. We can all shorten those travel times. That's really important," said Robert Boden of the TRU. "It saves dollars. When a bus is waiting in traffic, that is not only lost money for the agency, it is also poor service for the customers. It's amazing that you can actually speed up service with quicker trips and also save the agency money." To implement the policy successfully, Haley said the agency would need to figure out the initial capital and operating costs, make sure the system has enough ticket machines, fare inspectors and reliable Clipper card readers. The agency would also launch a "comprehensive public campaign" to inform riders of the new policy. One thing the agency wants to make sure it doesn't do "is send the message that Muni is free now," Reiskin told the directors. "The iss

In San Francisco, All-Door Boarding Catches On Yonah Freemark August 1st, 2011 | 30 Comments » San Francisco fights to speed up buses and trains by encouraging customers not to buy their tickets up front. Unlike underground metros or elevated trains, road-running streetcars and buses suffer from a significant slow-down: The time wasted waiting for people to board. The process is dreadfully sluggish in cities with well-used transit systems as large numbers of customers at popular stops are forced to line up at the front door and swipe their tickets or pay their fares in cash. In most cases, customers are forbidden from entering the bus at the rear door, even if they have unlimited ride cards. In dense cities, the result of these boarding difficulties are buses and trains that practically crawl down the street, even on corridors without much competing automobile traffic. In San Francisco at least, a solution is being studied: Allowing passengers to board at all doors, starting with a pilot program on the Muni Metro J-Church light rail line, which runs from downtown south into the Noe Valley and Balboa Park neighborhoods. There's nothing particularly controversial or revolutionary about San Francisco's proposal. Indeed, the concept of allowing people to get on a transit vehicle at any entryway is is not only standard on most rail networks and a basic component of most bus rapid transit investments, but it is also already in place for some customers on San Francisco's Muni Metro lines, which operate in a tunnel under Market Street downtown but for much of the remainder of their routes operate in shared lanes like streetcars. What's different here is the goal to extend the process to all customers on all services. San Francisco has some of the slowest transit speeds in the U.S., with the average Muni train or bus moving from place to place at a measly eight mph. Those slow speeds are an impediment to easy mobility throughout the city and discourage peop

Why the Bike Lane is the Golf Course of the 21st Century Posted on January 26, 2012 Hello Dear Readers, The Sightline Daily, a blog affiliated with a Northwest policy think tank, published an article I wrote about my Stevens Fellowship experience. You can read the article here! A funny story about how the opportunity with Sightline came about. I was waiting at a stoplight near Mercer Street in Seattle in late November and this guy pulled up to me (on his bicycle) and commented on how bad the bicycle infrastructure was at that particular intersection. He noticed that I had no "biking clothes" on and asked me if I'd ever heard of Copenhagen Cycle Chic.  "Copenhagen Cycle Chic is my favorite blog!" I told him. Then we started talking bike politics and eventually I realized he was Alan Durning, the founder of the Sightline Institute. I've been reading the Sightline blog and using their research in my work for years. I really like that this Sightline article came about because of a conversation that started on the bike lane (or..errr…lack of bike lane).  Who needs the golf course when you cycle! Cycling is such a social form of transport. Sean and I were biking in to work a few days before Christmas and bumped into our friend Jed who I hadn't seen in almost a year.  (Jed and his wife recently had a baby!) We rode together along the cold, but sunny, shores of Westlake for about ten minutes and caught up.  It was a great way to start the day and I was happy to know that Jed was doing well. Then, the next morning, Sean and I bumped into Jed again-in almost the same place as the day before-and we shared another pleasant commute together while joking about how we were becoming a bike commuter gang. The morning before I left for Copenhagen I biked downtown alone after saying goodbye to Sean. I was feeling the weight of the goodbye and also some anxiety about professional challenges ahead.  I pedaled slowly along Dexter, my pace matchi