San Francisco Is Gutting Muni to Hand It to Billionaires — and They Don’t Want You to Notice

If it feels like your Muni ride is taking longer, getting more expensive, or disappearing altogether, you’re not imagining it. The City is gutting our public transit system right in front of us. But this isn’t just bad budgeting or poor planning. It’s intentional. Because billionaires like Uber, Waymo, and their allies at City Hall aren’t content with building tech empires -- they want to own public transit too.

Just like with homelessness and drug policy, this isn’t about what works. It’s about what wins. And it’s working very well... for them. 

There were 158 million passenger rides on Muni last year. Muni is how most working class San Franciscans get around. But instead of investing in expanding service, Mayor Lurie and his corporate backers are defunding it by cutting lines, raising fares, and setting it up to fail.

This month, Uber announced its plan for a fixed-route shared-ride service. Sound familiar? That’s a bus. Instead of being a service for people, it will be operated for profit, with no regulation on fares – imagine the surge pricing when the Giants play. All this at the same time public transit is being cut. It’s not like we couldn’t see this coming. As far back as 2019, Uber told shareholders that its goal was to get people off public transit and into their cars. 

It’s a familiar playbook: defund, debase, and privatize. We’ve seen it happen to housing, healthcare, and our education system. We are breaking down public institutions by starving them of essential funding, then selling them off to private corporations. And now we’re watching it happen to Muni in real time. 

Lurie’s Billionaire’s Budget aggressively cuts from the bottom. Muni is being cut to save $7 million dollars, while refusing to even think about taxing the 50 billionaires who call San Francisco home. Instead of asking them to contribute and support their community, we are told we have no choice but to cut public transportation and let tech companies fill the gap. 

Then there’s Waymo, the autonomous vehicle arm of Google’s parent company Alphabet. With the Mayor’s blessing, their driverless Jaguars have been given access to what used to be a transit-priority corridor on Market Street. Meanwhile, Muni buses are being banned from the exact same stretch.

You read that right: the car-free stretch of Market Street, designed to prioritize public transit and people, has now been turned over to private tech.

The displacement is not theoretical. Multiple Muni lines have been pulled from Market, and Waymo got a carveout. San Francisco made space for the billionaires, and squeezed out the rest of us.

San Francisco should have the best public transit system on the West Coast. With the right vision and investment, Muni could rival the subways of New York, the metro in Paris, the bullet trains of Tokyo. But instead, we’re cutting service. We’re hiking fares. We’re creating artificial scarcity to justify privatization. And we’re turning neighbors against each other, blaming fare evaders or unhoused riders, while the real looters sign their deals in the boardroom. This isn’t about serving riders. It’s about serving shareholders.

We can fix this. But we need a City government that’s willing to stand up to billionaires, not roll out the red carpet for them. We need to tax the ultra-wealthy and fund the services we all rely on. We need to treat transit like the vital public infrastructure it is.

Muni doesn’t need to be reinvented. It needs to be respected, funded, protected, and expanded. Everyone rides the bus, but unless we act now, soon there might not be one left to ride.