THE DRIVER’S SEAT SQUEAKED LOUDLY as Brendan Bartholomew settled back against his cushion. He closed the bus door, opened the window, and fiddled with the control panel to start his daily safety check.
He tested the reverse lights. The kneeler. The doors. The ramp.
Line by line, Bartholomew peered through his steel-rimmed glasses at each item on his defect card, checking them off as he went.
At the end, satisfied, he signed his name and the date. Then, with an ease earned through years of repetition, Bartholomew pulled out of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s Woods Division bus yard and headed to the first stop of the 58 Lake Merced.
Bartholomew has been a Muni operator for almost a decade. Five days a week, 10 hours a day, he drives up and down the winding roads of San Francisco. He has been at it so long that he’s memorized the different buses’ idiosyncrasies: one has a switch that’s different from all the others, for example, jury-rigged from an older model. Another has an emergency exit door that is perpetually unsecured — it flaps open and shut to the rhythm of the bumps in the road.
But today, Bartholomew and thousands of other veteran Muni employees see their livelihoods at risk. The agency faces the biggest operational budget deficit of its lifetime: a $307 million financial cliff that, if unresolved, could lead the transit authority to cut up to 20 lines and double wait times on another 23. On the chopping block are Bartholomew’s current Monday, Tuesday and Saturday shifts, including the 58 Lake Merced. Muni’s worst-case scenario would involve laying off up to 2,100 employees: more than a third of its current staff.
Muni’s fiscal challenges are part of a broader struggle for funding that confronts Bay Area transit agencies. Bay Area Rapid Transit, or BART, faces an annual deficit of $376 million, which, in a worst-case scenario, could mean reducing from five lines to three and slashing up to 15 stations. AC Transit, $50 million in the red, may cut service by 16%. Caltrain, with a deficit of $75 million, may close more than a third of stations and eliminate all weekend service.
Bartholomew, who helps run a private Facebook group for operators, says his colleagues have mixed outlooks on the future of their agency. Some aren’t too worried. Some are catastrophizing.
As for Bartholomew? All he can do is cross his fingers.
“I really hope and pray that these cuts do not happen,” he said.
The job opportunity in 2017 had come from a friend’s post on Facebook. Bartholomew, then struggling to make ends meet as a freelance journalist, had jumped at the opportunity.
“I had sort of like fantasized about that off and on over the years because I was just fascinated by the equipment,” he said. “I would look at them, and I’d be like, ‘Could I do that?’”
Before the career change, the largest vehicle he had driven was a U-Haul van.
Bartholomew applied and graduated from the training program in 2017. After nine years, the old cliché that every day is an adventure still applies.
“People maybe don’t quite understand the amount of creative problem-solving that you have to engage in,” he said.
Sometimes there are route disruptions: a protest on the street, a road shut down because a building’s on fire. He has also dealt with unruly passengers: one time, a man repeatedly called him the n-word when he tried to enforce masking rules during COVID-19. Bartholomew takes pride in serving as his supervisors’ eyes and ears on the road and being the one to propose an approach.
“I love doing the job,” he said. Without a college degree, he knows there may not be many options if he loses it.
Bartholomew is good at being an operator, too. Outside of work, he reads up on the issues affecting his riders. He knows, for example, the demographics of who relies on his route in the Lake Merced area. It’s information that lets him anticipate problems before they happen. Once while Bartholomew was driving the 27 Bryant, a woman boarded en route to a homeless shelter; he gave her directions for a faster transfer, knowing it was about to close.
“You’re not going to make it in time if you stay on my bus,” he had told her. “You need to get off my bus, run to the 38 Geary, take the 38 Geary to Polk Street, and you’ll be right there.”
Every rider has a story
“Drive a bus, and you are simultaneously a whipping boy, sounding board, hall monitor, and priest-confessor,” Bartholomew had written in an essay when he first started. Almost a decade on, he still holds on to the belief that the people he meets are the best part of being a bus driver. There was the woman who passed through town on the way to Oregon with no plan and no food; Bartholomew had given her his grilled chicken salad and some cash for the journey. There was Ron, the elderly man who goes to Stonestown and holds court each day at Peet’s Coffee. Then there was Paul, who rides the bus to and from work and says the 58 gave him stability when he had none.
As he stopped at a red light and adjusted his grip on the wheel, Bartholomew thought about how, for many of his riders, service cuts would mean losing their main means of getting around.
Paul Valentine, one of Bartholomew’s regulars, used to live in a motorhome on John Muir Drive. Like many of the neighborhood’s other residents, he relied on the 58 to get to and from work.
“They’re holding down jobs in hopes they can find a place, but if the bus starts showing up less often, their jobs would be at risk,” he said. For many, paying for daily rideshares would be an untenable proposition.
When a bus route disappears, some riders lose more than transportation. They lose a connection to work, housing and the rest of the city.
Transit in the Bay Area hasn’t always been so financially strained. When Bartholomew first started as an operator, the Bay Area’s agencies were still the envy of the country’s transit systems. Back then, they generated most of their revenue through operations, according to policy director Laura Tolkoff of the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, 71% of BART’s budget came from rider fares, an anomaly within an industry where most major transit systems are at least half funded by state subsidies.
“It turns out that was our Achilles heel,” Tolkoff said.
When the pandemic hit, ridership and street parking declined, as did transit agencies’ funding. Plus, a growing number of riders simply stopped paying. Today’s operations make up just 30% of BART’s total revenue; the rest is government funding.
Muni, too, lost a substantial portion of its fare revenue overnight, according to Kat Siegal of the Stronger Muni for All campaign. That gap was temporarily closed by one-time federal funds, such as those disbursed through President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act in 2021.
But today the money is running out. In the meantime, fixed costs continue to rise, many Muni riders still don’t pay, and this time there’s no crisis bailout in sight.
The city looks farther away
Now, the afternoon sun cast outlines of windows and seats on the vinyl floors as the bus rounded a bend on John Muir Drive. Bartholomew fixed his shirt and looked ahead at the brightly painted facades of the Lakewood Apartments rising into view.
He knows that the road is home to a mixed-income population. There are market-rate apartments with stunning water views alongside rent-assisted Section 8 housing for low-income residents. If the route is cut, there would be no other Muni line that directly serves the neighborhood.
In his free time, Bartholomew has researched what would happen to his passengers if the worst were to happen. He knows that the nearest alternative, a SamTrans stop, is nearly a mile away from where most John Muir residents live — a 20-minute hike through a sparsely lit part of town. For some, service cuts would cut off their access to the city, he believes.
“It’s an apocalyptic scenario,” Bartholomew said.
Some local and regional nonprofits are trying to find a solution.
The Connect Bay Area initiative, which has collected over 300,000 signatures, would add a 14-year regional transportation sales tax to finance transportation agencies in six Bay Area counties. The tax is projected to generate $980 million each year.
Another proposal is what’s called Stronger Muni for All, Proposition H on the November ballot. The local measure would add a parcel tax based on building square footage, expected to raise around $160 million annually. The Transit Workers Union, of which Bartholomew is a member, has donated $50,000 to the cause.
Both campaigns reflect organizers’ urgency.
“Nobody else is coming to save us,” Tolkoff said.
According to Connect Bay Area spokesperson Jeff Cretan, the public response to the campaign has been positive. Connect Bay Area mobilized hundreds of volunteers to collect signatures, said Cretan, and most people they spoke to saw public transit as important. An October 2025 poll by Oakland-based EMC Research found that over half of voters would support the sales tax.
“There was a lot of energy around it, and it’s really set us up well for November,” Cretan said.
Muscle memory
Five and a half round trips, 44 stops each loop. Bartholomew would drive on as the sun dipped lower toward horizon, pausing only for his scheduled recovery time back at 19th Avenue and Buckingham Way. People got on. People got off. What he never stopped doing was swinging his gaze between the rearview, the side mirror and the road ahead.
Left. Right. Left. Windshield. He leaned with his upper body and turned his head each time, scanning for potential traffic hazards. Just this April, a fellow driver on the 58 had been seriously injured after a suspected vehicle thief rammed into the bus during a car chase, right in the 500 block of John Muir. Since becoming a Muni operator, safe driving has become a matter of reflex for Bartholomew: habitually making tighter right turns, for example, so that motorcyclists don’t try to squeeze past.
Sometimes the muscle memory is slow to come. Last June, Bartholomew had to relearn his usual Friday trips on the 9 San Bruno. In an economy move, the line, along with the 5 Fulton and 31 Balboa, was shortened to turn around at Market Street, while the 6 Haight-Parnassus and 21 Hayes were combined into one route. The day before, he had to grab a copy of the new route sheet and practice in his own car until he could get it down pat. But for many residents along his route, the change was much more of a surprise.
“You’d have people throwing a temper tantrum, saying, ‘I’ve been riding this bus for 20 years. It always goes down Market Street. What do you mean you’re not going to the ferry building?’” he said.
He worried about how riders may react if more sweeping changes were to happen.
According to transportation expert William Riggs at the University of San Francisco, service cuts as dramatic as those potentially in Muni’s future could risk triggering what’s called a “transit death spiral”: a vicious cycle where limited service leads to lower ridership, which decreases revenues, which leads to further service cuts. This can erode a city’s economy: “public transportation is directly linked with economic growth and access to jobs,” Riggs said.
For a place like San Francisco, where people rely on public transportation not just to get to work but also for day-to-day travel, the vacuum would be keenly felt.
“All of those things have an economic resilience effect on our local and regional economies,” Riggs said.
For riders who struggle to afford the cost of a Lyft or an Uber, travel would become more impractical. “Right now, you’re able to just kind of walk out the door, and you know a bus or train is gonna be coming relatively soon, no matter what,” said Dylan Fabris, Community and Policy Manager at the nonprofit San Francisco Transit Riders. But if wait times double, as they might on some 23 of Muni’s lines, riders would have to be more intentional with their transit planning.
Others might choose to forgo public transit entirely. “I’m going to have to bike more places,” said Carter Lavin, co-founder of the Transbay Coalition.
Hit particularly hard might be the city’s recovering nightlife. Beginning in January, BART may have to cut all service after 9 p.m., while Muni could end regular service at the same time.
“A $3 trip on Muni if you stay out past nine might be turning into a $20 trip in an Uber,” said Fabris.
But even those who are able to drive may not avoid being impacted, since the increase in cars could increase congestion. It would “grind everyone’s life to a much slower level,” Lavin said.
To your health
Bartholomew knows a few things by heart: the routes he drives, the names of his regulars, and the belief that access to transit should not be a luxury. Growing up in Pacifica, where owning a car is nearly a prerequisite to living a decent life, he is all too familiar with how costly being on the road can be.
Just a few weeks ago, his healthcare provider sent him a survey of factors that might be challenging to his health. Did he have reliable transportation? Did he have trouble getting to doctor’s appointments?
“That’s how serious this is. It’s like, transportation is not optional,” Bartholomew said.
The annual cost of owning a car in 2025 was around $11,577. Add that to the already-high costs of living in the Bay Area, and it could put families under serious financial strain. Having affordable public transit allows families to “move around their communities, to jobs, and take the kids to school, and soccer practice, and all that,” said Dehan Glanz, an urban planning lecturer at Stanford University.
“The more that you give families options, other than private automobiles, it helps the families’ bottom line.”
The problem of affordability is also one of equity. Users of public transportation are disproportionately lower-income, since middle- and high-income populations are more able to afford their own cars or access services such as rideshare. “We’re really playing with fire when we underfund public transit, because it disproportionately impacts the most vulnerable,” Riggs said.
The highest concentration of Muni’s service cuts, if implemented, would hit districts such as Lakeshore the hardest — among the areas with a lower percentage of high-income households in San Francisco. After cuts, 13 census tracts primarily in the Tenderloin, Mission and Financial District neighborhoods would contain no Muni stops. Lakeshore would be the 14th least-served tract, with only 2.36 stops per square mile.
From talking to the riders on his route, Bartholomew believes cutting the line would be a hit to their health, income, and quality of life.
“If you lose the bus, what are you going to do?”
The wind roared outside his window and he shifted the placement of his hand on the grooved underside of the wheel.
Left on Arch, left on Brotherhood Way, left on Lake Merced Boulevard — Bartholomew listened to the quiet conversations in the seats behind him and focused on the familiar turns that he had made, on and off, since the line itself was created in 2021.
A woman squinted at her flip phone through a magnifying glass. An elderly man in a striped shirt hugged his tiny backpack. The doors hissed open as the bus rolled to a stop.
“Have a good afternoon!” Bartholomew said cheerily to the pair getting off. They stepped out into the glaring afternoon sun.
Turning to face the road ahead, Bartholomew pushed his glasses back up and shifted the gear back into drive. Five more hours until the end of his shift. As he drove, the threatened cuts were never far from his mind. He didn’t know what would happen to the route, his passengers or the job that had given him a sense of purpose.
For now, all he could do was keep on driving.
