How the MTA Staged a Skewed, Mathematically Inaccurate, and Dishonest SF Bicycle Survey

Is the MTA just an incompetent agency?

Is the MTA just an incompetent agency?

On March 16, 2024, a family of four was tragically killed while waiting for an L Taraval streetcar outside of the West Portal shopping district. It’s a fact that the family would all be alive today if they were allowed to wait inside the protected West Portal Station. As an indictment of the Municipal Transportation Agency’s (MTA) incompetency, last week the Mission Local’s Joe Eskenazi astutely pointed out,^[i] it took just slightly less time for the MTA to complete the L Taraval renovations than it did to complete the entire Transcontinental Railway. That snail-paced work not only severely hurt businesses along the Taraval corridor, but it put the victim-family in harm’s way. The MTA’s overreach into replacing street thoroughfares with bike lanes is no less bungled.

A bankrupt agency

Per the San Francisco MTA website, the agency expects to suffer a combined $25 million budget deficit in the current and subsequent fiscal year. In the approaching 2026/2027 fiscal year, the MTA expects to experience a $240 million deficit. The MTA states the gigantic deficit is attributable to a San Francisco still “recovering from the economic impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic” and because “federal, state and regional relief will run out.” Bottom line, the MTA simply can’t balance their books without depending on the federal taxes paid by residents of other states. It’s been years since we were required to wear masks, and the MTA is still scapegoating COVID for their deficits?

Despite their looming deficits, and allowing at least half their riders to evade paying fares,^[ii] the MTA still spends millions of taxpayer dollars to:

1) reconfigure our city streets for bicycles, which has made driving more complex for cars and bicyclists,

2) channeled $10,000 per week to the SF Bicycle Coalition for their advocacy against cars, and

3) per the MTA website, gave taxpayer funds to Vision Zero,^[iii] which also campaigns against cars.

If you don’t believe the MTA is trying to drive people out of their cars to fund their perpetual deficit, please watch this video. MTA added a bizarre “neckdown” to Kirkham Street which employs unnecessary islands, in the middle of a normal urban street, to convert the street to the equivalent of a rural one-lane bridge. The sole purpose of this neckdown is to make driving more difficult for our citizens.

The MTA’s history of bogus anti-car surveys

After the West Portal family was killed, the MTA structured a survey that allowed anyone in the world to weigh in on how they thought West Portal should be reconfigured to reduce car access. No survey credentials were required; you never had to have even visited San Francisco; you could vote as often as you wanted.

Similarly, when the former director of the MTA, Jeffrey Tumlin, wanted to close the Upper Great Highway to car traffic, he orchestrated a $57,000 payment to consultants to count pedestrians and bicycles on a single, preannounced weekend. No proof was submitted whether pedestrians weren’t double counted on their return walks, or if pedestrians were merely crossing the Upper Great Highway to access the beach.

The MTA’s latest anti-car survey quietly occurred in 2024 with the San Francisco’s Biking and Rolling Plan (hereafter SFBRP). Following our five reasons that document how the MTA’s newest survey follows the agency’s same pattern of deceit.

1) The Biking and Rolling Plan Surveys were conducted by advocacy groups, not independent and objective parties

Vision Zero, which we learned (above) is partially funded by MTA, spearheaded the pro-bike, anti-car SFBRP surveys, along with the SF Climate Action Strategy run by another SF government agency, the San Francisco Environment Department. I wonder how San Franciscans would have reacted if this survey was conducted by Chevron, Exxon, or General Motors. From the MTA website:

It’s actually quite simple to meet Vision Zero’s goals of eliminating fatal traffic accidents in San Francisco— just disallow cars, bikes, skateboards…. anything with wheels. The only problem is that this creates a tradeoff to our city’s economy when we reduce citizens’ mobility. By allowing groups with a single, anti-car agenda to conduct this survey, to the exclusion of businesses, makes the results appear to be tailored to the group’s objectives. We need to blend economists and accountants’ input with the engineers so we can experience a balanced and vibrant San Francisco economy.

2) Ridiculously small sample set

To sell the SFBRP, the San Francisco Environment Department, and the MTA held community meetings. Before the pandemic,^[iv] there were between 35,000 and 54,000 registered voters in each of San Francisco supervisorial district. Yet, on average, only 48 people attended each district’s bike rollout meeting. That translates to every attendee’s voice carrying the weight of almost 1,000 voters. Or to put it in context, it’s the equivalent of the US electing our president, not by counting the 150+ million American voters, but based on the opinions of just four SF supervisorial districts.

3) Only 10 people showed up to the District 7 meeting

In the November 2024 election, Districts 1, 4, and 7 voted overwhelmingly to keep the Upper Great Highway open to cars. The voter heatmaps shows only a small donut hole of District 7 voters supported closing the Upper Great Highway (and Supervisor Myrna Melgar’s November election). So, if you wanted anti-car results from your survey, where would you host the D7 community meeting?

You guessed it. Right there in the light green island at the bottom of the map—San Francisco State. At the college, only 10 people showed up to the bike rollout meeting to represent a district with over 40,000 registered voters. It makes you wonder where all those Prop K/Melgar November 2024 voters disappeared to?^[v]

4) Bike advocates attended multiple district meetings

No community meeting was held in the bike-centric, most progressive District 9. The reasoning? Per the MTA, “many” D9 voters already showed up to community meetings in other districts. (Page 270 of SFBRP)

This raises the issue of what internal controls the bicycling advocates implemented to prevent multiple attendances or non-San Franciscan residents from weighing in on the SFBRP? I mean, if the pro-biking MTA was alarmed at D7 residences showing up at multiple meetings, how bad was survey response stuffing?^[vi]

5) Attendees were overwhelming skewed towards bikers

In 2008, the MTA surveyed that 16% of San Franciscans bicycle at least twice per week. Yeah, I get it. The number of SF bicyclists has increased since 2008. So, for sake of argument, let’s double SF bike ridership to 32%. That still means that the 76% of survey attendees that bicycle, is more than double the proportion of SF bike riders in the general population. This gross overrepresentation of bicyclists also confirms the allegation in #4 (above) that the same bike riders answered surveys in multiple district meetings.

6) MTA’s arithmetic is inaccurate

For the anti-car set, the benefit of more bike routes should be that it will make more people comfortable to bicycle. That would justify more bicycle infrastructure spending. Note (above) how only 3 people, out of MTA’s-reported 486 attendees, said they wanted to start biking.

Besides being an unrealistic, sloppy government-quality statistic, it’s inaccurate. On whether an attendee wanted to start biking, I tabulated the correct attendees’ survey results from each district’s individual votes that appear on the subsequent pages of the SFBRP.

The MTA’s published that the 3 people that want to start biking, was actually 33. That number represents that only 7% of the 486 MTA-reported attendees expressed an interest in starting to bike. Worse, a 50% greater number of attendees said they had no intention to start biking, ever! This stat documents the MTA’s failure to read the room, while still intending to waste millions of dollars on a bicycle infrastructure program that only benefits a dinky, vocal minority.

What SF taxpayers want MTA’s objectives to be

I have been a non-spandex-wearing SF bike commuter since I was a kid. Biking to high school, college, grad school, Giants’ games, and work at Candlestick Park and SFPD. My commuting frequently includes Muni buses, but never streetcars. I appreciate much of what the Bicycle Coalition has achieved for us.

When two of the wealthiest men in America were asked what single word led to their success, both Bill Gates and Warren Buffett answered, “focus.” Despite the biking improvements, the MTA has lost focus on the goal of creating a pleasant experience where San Franciscan’s can enjoy riding as an alternative to driving. Instead, the MTA’s objective seems to be decreasing the ease of driving to force people out of their cars and onto trains, to reduce the MTA’s red ink. This is a backwards strategy.

The MTA’s bike goals are an overreach. The MTA needs to focus on making Muni streetcars more efficient and rein in the hundreds of millions of dollars lost to excessive fare evasion and producing dishonest surveys.

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^[i] Mission Local, Joel Engardio, past recall backer, has tougher path to stave off recall, February 17, 2025

^[ii] The MTA claims that 80% of riders pay their fares. On February 13, 2025, I issued a public records request to the MTA asking them to support this figure. I have not received a response back yet.

^[iii] In response to my last article on the MTA’s overreach, Supervisor Melgar’s staff stated my article, “falsely claims that Vision Zero is ‘falsely based on the premise that human error can be eliminated.”’ As a point of reference, per Vision Zero’s page on the MTA website, “the municipal transportation agency joined city leaders in 2014 to adopt a policy called Vision Zero, with the goal of eliminating all traffic deaths in San Francisco.” That literally means that for no traffic deaths to occur, no human errors can occur.

^[iv] I could not find a Department of Elections voter count published since 2000.

^[v] Imagine all those absentee November 2024 ballots arriving simultaneously at student housing. “Hey, who are you voting for president?” “Same as me. Why don’t you mark the president, and since you’re only a freshman and don’t know the local issues, do you mind if I complete the rest of the ballot and mail it in for you?”

^[vi] Last week, I issued a public records request to the MTA asking for the sign-in sheets for the 10 district meetings.