I posted that study to give people a sense of what price elasticity of demand means. It's all about options; if you can substitute something else for your product, and the price goes up, you'll stop buying it. In some cities, New York, for example, there's not a lot of choice -- you live at 86th and Lex and you work downtown, and it' s winter, you can take the subway or you can take a cab. Or you can stay home. In San Francisco, where it's mild most of the year, you can walk, you can bike -- or, because it's not as congested as Manhattan, you can drive. Lots of people do. When the cost of Muni -- fare price plus opportunity cost (time wasted, inconvenience) plus unpleasantness of the experience exceeds the cost of taking another mode of transportation, people will switch.

So in fact, in San Francisco, fare increases have a greater impact on ridership than they do in many cities.

And gas taxes and parking fees aren't bailouts, which are one-time solutions; those are steady, ongoing revenue streams to improve public transit. Make it faster, make it cheaper, make it easier and more people will do it -- which is what we all want in a transit-first city.

As a practical matter, yes, there are some reasonable alternatives to Muni. and if people walk or bike to work, that eases congestion and pullution which is a good thing.

I read somewhere earlier today that in the Bay Area as a whole, an extra billion dollars is needed to fully subsidize existing piublic transit routes and schedules. Unless Tim happens to know of a large rock with a billion dollars under it (and no "tax the rich" line, pul-eeze) then we are only debating where to cut and not whether.

Personally I am still struggling to understand why a Muni trip costs the same as a 20 mile subway trip in NYC. Then again, I'm not sure I want to know.

Jeff

There is no nation on the planet where gas costs $20 a gallon. Even in Scandinavia, which never saw a tax it didn't like, it runs out at no more than $10 a gallon.

But your idea is a nice way to kill the U.S. economy stome dead though. I'm sure you feel that is worth it, in order to spare a few fringe bus services that few use anyway, right?

The death spiral is the exact problem here: You keep cutting service and raising fares (and laying off, for example, the people who clean the buses) and Muni becomes far less attractive an option, so fewer people ride, so less money comes in, so more cuts are needed, so service gets worse ... And honestly, the only way to break it at this point is to pump in more money.

The billion-dollar figure is for the entire Bay Area, a large and wealthy region. A modest increase in the gas tax (I'm with Jeff on the impacts, but I think $20 a gallon would hurt too many working-class people), a local version of the state vehicle-license fee that the guv killed, higher parking fees and taxes on development that actually equal the impacts these commercial and residential projects have on transit demand and San Francisco could come very close to making Muni work again. 

Consolidate all these ridiculous money wasting operations. Instead of two dozen boards of directors made up of Carol Midgen like hacks, one would be fine, we could concentrate the hackery to one board. Then set the routes so that people can get from one place in the bay area to another without going through hell.

Then have a campaign around about transit behavior, so that riding the bus isn't like taking a walk through Somalia or Albania.

Then set budget priorities, are we going to fund mass transit or are we going to hand out money to every little group that goes begging to Chris Daly, David Campos or some other bastion of the spoils system?