CA: New SFMTA chief hopes to solve transit issues with 'Midwest nice' compromise. Will it work?

The new director of San Francisco's sprawling transportation agency stepped in at a moment of strife.

Transportation is a utility — but in this city, it's also become a flashpoint for culture wars. As Muni officials contemplate service cuts to stave off a budget crisis this summer, residents bicker over which neighborhoods or lines should be spared. Motorists are on edge, with traffic increasing on major arteries and freeways, and California's new daylighting law making parking more scarce. The phrase "war on cars" has made a comeback, and some drivers cry foul every time the city shaves out a lane for buses and cyclists.

Enter Julie Kirschbaum, a Muni lifer with a knack for negotiation, facing the maelstrom with a clear-eyed vision for her role: She would listen to everyone, and try to compromise. Where her predecessors had emphasized the "trade-offs" that different road users have to make, Kirschbaum speaks in softer terms.

"We're trying to find win-wins," she said during an interview with the Chronicle at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency's management center — the bus and rail equivalent of an air traffic control tower.

Sitting in an office suite that looked into the center's main operations room — where employees stared at a multi-paneled screen with live security footage from bus and Metro stops — Kirschbaum reflected on her first seven weeks at the helm of a powerful city department. She had served as acting director after her predecessor, Jeffrey Tumlin, retired in December. Mayor Daniel Lurie appointed her last week to replace him.

She characterized herself, alternately, as a "bridge-builder" and a "force-multiplier," someone quick to acknowledge the contributions of her staff and to accept feedback from the outside. At the same time, Kirschbaum has a clear philosophy and message for San Franciscans: She wants people to understand their commonalities, and not imagine themselves as discrete groups jockeying for space on the roads.

"Most people in the city are not just bikers, or just drivers or just transit riders," Kirschbaum said.

To illustrate the point, she offered an example from her personal life.

"Last week, I drove my daughter to school. Then I took the train into the office. Then I walked to a meeting at City Hall. If I'm going to one of our further divisions, and it's a tight schedule, I grab a car. And if I have more time, I take the bus. Having choices is what makes San Francisco's transportation system so special."

A mother of two who rides the K Ingleside to work when she's not dropping kids off at school, Kirschbaum, 50, is the first woman to serve as a permanent director of SFMTA — others have filled in on an interim basis. She has an infectious laugh and eyes that dance when she talks about train nerdery. Originally from the Twin Cities in Minnesota, Kirschbaum has what she calls a "Midwest nice" disposition.

Some observers wonder whether Kirschbaum is in fact too nice, and lacks the ferocity to make deep cuts next year after federal and state COVID relief funding runs out, and Muni confronts a fiscal cliff. That could mean downsizing her own staff, convincing the city or region to shift money away from long-term capital projects and possibly standing up to labor unions, said Gerald Cauthen, a retired Muni employee and president of the Bay Area Transportation Working Group.

"To do that, you need a lot of personality and a lot of political backing," Cauthen said. "I don't think she's got that."

Whether the two men who preceded Kirschbaum had more political juice is an open question. Ed Reiskin, a former public works czar, led the SFMTA until 2019, when Mayor London Breed pressured him to resign after a massive subway meltdown. His successor, Tumlin, arrived as a "visionary" from the private sector, but ultimately became a polarizing figure.

But Cauthen also praised Kirschbaum for being conscientious and listening to people's advice. Others, including BART Board Directors Janice Li and Edward Wright, believe the new SFMTA chief will rebuild trust in her agency at a time of heightened skepticism in city government.

Rafael Mandelman, president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, predicted that Kirschbaum will "turn the temperature way down" in a department that's long been at the center of controversies. Tumlin, a brash change-maker from the outside, imagined a city where cars didn't rule the road. By contrast, Kirschbaum is a transit insider who rose through the department bureaucracy, and ran the operations of Muni from 2018 until late last year.

"She comes from the side of SFMTA that delivers services, so her literal focus is getting the trains and buses to run on time," Mandelman said, anticipating that Kirschbaum will try to avoid "unnecessary" battles.

To SFMTA Board Chair Janet Tarlov, Kirschbaum appears to have the right personality for the moment. After the devastation of COVID, San Francisco continues to push through a period of economic recovery. Muni has restored ridership to about 75% of pre-pandemic levels as more workers return to their offices, but dwindling city and state funds, and a loss of parking revenue in downtown garages, has left the agency with a $50 million shortfall this summer.

Closing that gap should be the agency's top priority, Tarlov said. The task requires a pragmatic but compassionate leader, who can scale back transit service but limit the pain — either by keeping a reliable bus route within walking distance for most residents, or by prioritizing the lower-income, racially diverse neighborhoods that highly depend on public transportation. Kirschbaum hasn't yet specified which approach she will take.

"We have a lot of tough realities we have to contend with," Tarlov said. "The pragmatic approach, in my view, is the most likely to be successful."

Lurie, the mayor, also praised Kirschbaum's common sense and ability to unify people in a press release announcing her appointment. In the release, Lurie cited what may have been Kirschbaum's first critical test of leadership: The rollout of the state daylighting law to restrict parking near crosswalks, and make pedestrians more visible.

While SFMTA officials were eager to comply with the law, they quickly saw a problem. The city had to create 20-foot "no parking" buffers on the vehicle "approach" sides of crosswalks, but SFMTA didn't have enough funding to paint all the affected curbs. The agency's initial compromise — $108 tickets for people who parked in red daylit zones, and $40 tickets for those who parked in the unmarked ones — struck a lot of drivers as unfair.

When Kirschbaum took over in late December, she began meeting with residents and community groups, and heard a litany of concerns from people who thought it "too punitive to receive a parking ticket in an unexpected place."

Early this month, she scrapped the $40 ticketing plan and pledged to accelerate the process of curb-striping.

Clearly impressed, Lurie said in his release that "Kirschbaum has already demonstrated how she plans to find common ground among users of the transportation system."

Although Kirschbaum is a veteran of SFMTA who has spent several years in the public eye, few people recognized her riding the F streetcar on a recent Monday afternoon. Trailed by a reporter and photographer, wearing a lapel pin with her agency's logo, Kirschbaum still managed to blend in with other passengers.

But when a rider stopped to chat with her briefly about the street car's eye-catching design, Kirschbaum suddenly became animated. She knew the history of the vintage vehicle by heart — how it was manufactured in 1946 and procured by San Francisco officials in 2004, still bearing the navy blue and gray colors of its New Jersey hometown.

"Car 1070," Kirschbaum said, name-checking the streetcar with a grin.

With a friendly wave to the driver, she disembarked at Market and Church streets. The F streetcar clattered away, on time to its next stop in the Castro. It represented a small piece of the vast transportation network that Kirschbaum now oversees.

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