The Muni board is set to vote on the Culture Bus’ future at its meeting this month and by all accounts, the vote will be a formality that will see it end in September, one year after its launch. The pilot program was designed to shuttle San Francisco cultural tourists between areas of interest such as the museums in Golden Gate Park, around Union Square, the Civic Center, and SoMa. With the backing of the Visitors’ Bureau and the mayor, the plan was to augment the city’s transportation system in helping people travel to and between cultural interests more easily than would otherwise be possible.
While the intentions were good, the reality is that the project failed dramatically to raise its ridership that would be necessary to make it viable. The five buses were originally scheduled to collect riders every twenty minutes, but a schedule reduction began just four months into the launch due to low ridership, which collected only 10% of the costs incurred. The effort has resulted in a half million dollar deficit on the project.
The deficit comes at a bad time for San Francisco’s Muni as the agency debates the path toward climbing out from under more than one hundred million dollars in debt. In that atmosphere, there is little room for funding toward new projects, or time for figuring out how to make them work; they either sink or swim from the outset or they face termination as looks all but certain For the Culture Bus. The sites of interest will once again necessitate using public transportation or various San Francisco tours, but the time and cost will be increased respectively.
