Muni sees ridership increase again with the best month in more than four years

San Francisco Muni’s recovery from the pandemic has reached a new milestone. In September, more than half a million people used the system every weekday.

That was the best month for the transit agency since February 2020, but the recovery has been uneven.

“Kids,” laughed Muni rider Sue Jean Halvorsen when asked who she sees on buses. “A lot more seniors. A lot more disabled. Because I always thought, ‘Oh, I can get on the bus and I have open access to that front row of seats.’ No way. There are so many people there. It’s almost a crowd.”

Halveren drove through the city on bus 24 Divisadero. Ask her and she will say that this bus is usually quite full.

“I think I’m seeing more people on the bus during the day than ever before,” she said of her rides.

“This month marks a remarkable milestone as we averaged more than half a million daily boardings per day,” Jeffrey Tumlin, SFMTA director of transportation, said during Tuesday’s SFMTA board meeting.

With an average of 521,000 passengers last month, Muni is at 74% of pre-pandemic ridership, up 8% from September of last year. And the shortage of passengers that remains is increasingly tied to one function of the system.

“Before COVID, our highest passenger station in the entire system was Montgomery Street station,” Tumlin explained. “Montgomery Street Station is at 28% of recovery from pre-COVID-19 pandemic ridership.”

Downtown and subway traffic has increased, but not as much as the rest of the system, including some bus routes that are now running above pre-pandemic ridership.

“And so in the city that has lost the most transit ridership simply through the loss of office commuters, we’ve offset that by having some of the highest ridership recovery rates in the world on some of our non-downtown commuter lines,” Tumlin told me to the newspaper. SFMTA Board.

‘Yes. I think there are more people. Definitely more people,” Halvorsen said. “But it’s as eclectic as ever.”

On weekends, Muni is doing even better with 92% of its pre-pandemic ridership. And that difference of 18% compared to weekdays further underlines the decline in business traffic in the city center. That rebuild is something Muni describes as work progress, but the numbers across the system are slowly improving.