Once again, San Francisco’s main public transit systems—the Municipal Railway (MUNI) and the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART)—are broke. MUNI’s annual budget is ~$1.49 billion, but it has a $307 million deficit going into 2027 (slated to expand to $434 million within five years). BART’s annual budget is ~$2.3 billion, and it faces a $376 million shortfall, which is also posed to expand in 2028.
Once again, San Francisco voters are asked to intervene, with two upcoming measures: an additional property tax on all real estate in the city, and a supplemental 1% sales tax on all transactions in the city. If both taxes pass, the median household in San Francisco will see their tax bill increase by $450.
And if either tax fails, both BART and MUNI will make absolutely massive service cuts. For MUNI, the long-tail of lesser-used bus lines will be eliminated. All “rapid” bus lines will be canceled. Frequencies will be cut by 50% across the board. The underground section of the MUNI will stop running after 9PM. For BART, there will be 70% frequency cuts across all lines. All trains will stop running after 9PM—including the airport lines. Fifteen stations will close. And parking fees will (at least) increase by 50%.
This is the apocalypse scenario for public transit. Service cuts will destroy ridership, which will have a major impact on revenue. That will also lead to lower state subsidization, which will worsen service, which will itself reduce ridership. This locks the system into a negative feedback cycle which will compound into a generational disaster for transit in San Francisco.
If these taxes fail, the system will not recover for a decade.
Given the scale of our impending disaster, there’s a seemingly obvious answer to the tax question: vote for them. The most technologically important city in the world, where ambitious acolytes labor to conjure a digital God, should have trains that run after 9PM.
This is the angle advocates have taken. The system is broke, transit is important. “A fully functioning Muni is essential for that bustling economy,” they say. And they’re emphasizing the doom. “BART is not too big to fail.” They mention the second-order effects too. SF’s mild post-pandemic recovery will be extinguished and the city will return to its 2020-era gloom. House values in outlying suburbs will crater. Job creation will decline and labor shortages will multiply.
I don’t disagree with any of these impacts. Assuming these agencies aren’t inflating the impact, and the crisis does seem dire enough that they aren’t, the advocates are right. Vote yes, because while taxes suck, the downside of a broken transit system is unbounded.
But there is a certain moral exhaustion this rhetoric brings. Living in SF, it seems like every public service is perpetually on the brink of crisis—always one additional tax from utter bankruptcy—and there’s always some reason to pay more. The appeals for money, each time, always read like moral exhortations tinged with noblesse oblige, where you should pay because you can pay, and you shouldn’t question much more than that. Efficiency, effective usage, cost controls: these barely even enter the discussion.
To me, this begs the obvious question: is our transit actually underfunded? Or does it just spend its money poorly?
The most common explanation I hear about BART and MUNI’s eternal decrepitude are its wasteful labor costs. In an odd similarity, we hear this about colleges, about public schools, about healthcare, and now, about transit, and you hear it ever more often now because of DOGE. Elon claimed to uncover trillions in waste in government; even now, nearly a year after his departure, he spent thirty minutes on the Dwarkesh podcast railing against long-dead social security recipients dutifully collecting their fraudulent billions.
At the federal level, his claims have dubious veracity. But MUNI and BART do have considerable spending on labor. Perhaps there’s something different here.
In MUNI’s operating budget in FY2025, about $919.1M—nearly two-thirds—goes to labor. Another $271.4M share goes to “professional services,” which includes spending on consultants, software systems, legal services, and IT support. The final ~10% goes to materials and debt service. For BART, the breakdown is similar. Out of a $1.2B operating budget, $763.3M—about two-thirds—goes to labor, $243.4M is for non-labor expenses (including parts, maintenance, and the “professional-services” category above), and another $145M goes to debt service [7].
That does seem like suspiciously high labor spending.
What does labor refer to here? SFMTA, in a section designed to respond almost exactly to this line of questioning, states that “80% of labor costs go to operators or direct support, and 97% of employees are non-management.” In aggregate, there are 6,292 budgeted FTE, with 5,169 in transit. Out of those 2,670 are transit operators (bus drivers and train operators), 1,003 in vehicle maintenance, 676 in line management, 445 in infrastructure maintenance, 348 in cleanliness and security, and 27 in safety compliance. Out of remaining ~1000, 601 are in revenue generation, a broad category including parking citation officers, fare inspectors, meter operations, and parking facility staff, 350 are in admin, 142 are in street management and safety (crossing guards, signal technicians, etc) and 35 are in various minor transit initiatives.
BART shows a similar background. They have 3,760 FTEs. Out of these, ~1000 are train operators, station agents, and other train-related employees, 763 in train and track maintenance, and the remaining in safety and compliance. Another 409 are BART police, hired to enforce order. The remainder are administration staff: HR, finance, IT, land-use and planning, infrastructure development, communications, and our favorite bugbears: civil rights and DEI.
From these breakdowns, I don’t see many obvious cuts. MUNI’s administration seems fairly small, and while BART’s is considerably larger, the service itself covers much more ground. There is probably bloat, but not enough to actually dent the budget. Yes, the DEI section is indeed quite useless, but cutting it saves almost nothing.
Why do we need so many transit employees? The short answer is that running trains is a labor-intensive business with minimal automation, which is worsened by strict union requirements.
For the long answer, let’s start with BART. The Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) allows for 12 hour shifts per operator, with 11 hours of mandated rest. Part-time operators are capped at 25 hours a week and 15% of the workforce. BART itself says it only runs 62 trains simultaneously at peak hours. If you consider each running train a “slot,” then to cover that slot, you need at least two operators a day. You actually need more, because not every operator does a 12 hour shift each working day, and if they work more than 40 hours a week they get overtime. You also cannot keep operators “around” for longer than 12 hours: that is, even if peak hour is passed and the train count reduced, you can’t make an operator “off-the-clock” and reactivate them during the next peak segment—you’re billed for the continuous segment and you need new operators after that 12 hrs. Putting that all together, you need at least 4-5 operators per slot, without accounting for vacations, weekends, sick days, trainings, and “wow I really need to pee right now so let’s swap” emergencies.