Muni Cops Ridealong
This week, SF Weekly News Blog contributor Benjamin Wachs rides along with the surge in Muni Cops, inspecting fares and providing help. Watch your ass, SF. - d2
“Fast Pass Please” gets the fast track
After nearly doubling the number of fare inspectors riding the rails, MUNI’s going to double them again this year.
By Benjamin Wachs
It’s 10:30 on a Thursday morning. At one side of the N Judah, Fare Inspector Nelson Magobet is talking to a man in his late-20s. The man is looking through his bag.
“I lost it,” he says. “But I got a transfer. I just … lost it.”
Magobet says that if he can find it ...
before he finishes writing out the ticket, then he’s off the hook.
Two car lengths down, Inspector Juan Contreras is talking to a woman in her mid-30s. She has the same story.
“I lost it,” she says, rooting through her bag. “I … lost it.” To prove she’s a good transit rider, she produces a small army of transit receipts from previous days – in chronological order – and waves them in Contreras’ face. “See?”
Contreras is unmoved.
The scene is anything but tense: the guy yawns and leans his head against the wall. The woman goes back to reading her newspapers. And Contreras and Magobet display an awe-inspiring ability to fill out paperwork on a moving train. As someone who takes notes for a living, I’m deeply impressed.
Do I even need to say that nobody found their valid transfer?
Scenes like this are getting more common, and are going to get a lot more frequent. Since 1999, MUNI has had about 19 fare inspectors at any one time. But, by the end of this past fiscal year (July), they’d hired 16 more to ride the rails – an almost 100% increase in the number of people checking for your fast pass. By the end of this fiscal year, they plan to more than double that number again, for a total of 63 fare inspectors.
Message to MUNI riders: this is the year to start watching your ass.
Officers split up into pairs, and each pair is assigned two train lines a day. They’ll ride up and down the lines, hitting 30 trains a day, inspecting fares and conducting inspections at the major platforms (like Powell, Embarcadero and Van Ness) as well.
More fare inspections, of course, mean more money in MUNI’s coffers: in ’05 – 06, the last fiscal year before the increase, MUNI made $109,966 off fare citations. Last year, with 19 new officers added at the tail end of the year, MUNI made $181,462.
No, that’s not enough to pay for 19 new salaries with benefits, but it wouldn’t be: as it currently stands, boarding MUNI without a valid transfer is a criminal citation, which means you go to court and MUNI doesn’t see most of the money you get fined. That’s going to change soon, though: the city is in the process of decriminalizing the process, so that failing to buy a ticket will become an “infraction,” rather than a crime, and will be handled as a purely administrative matter – they way parking tickets are. MUNI stands to see a significantly higher share of each fine paid under this new system.
But Contreras and Magobet also say they expect to see fewer fines, not more, with the additional officers.
Why? Because, in their view, the system is working: more fare inspections mean more people end up paying to get on board … and there are fewer people to fine.
“It’s changing for the better. Big change,” Magobet said. “People have gotten with it. Gotten their passes. They see us coming, whip out their passes, boom. It’s smooth. I’m going home with a lot fewer headaches.”
Even if they’re not dolling out the fines, MUNI cops still serve another important function: they are walking information booths. Spending an hour with these guys riding up and down the N-Judah, I only saw three fines. But I saw three times as many people ask them for directions, or an explanation of how the fare system works, or for information on contacting MUNI. One woman who turned out to be on the wrong train spoke only Spanish; which was okay because both Magobet and Contrerasare fluent. In fact, almost half of the MUNI fare inspectors are functionally bi-lingual. Spanish, Mandarin, Vietnamese … they try to cover their bases.
“In a city like this?” asked Contreras. “It’s just absolutely necessary.”
The downside is that you get to hear “I lost my transfer” in a dozen different languages.
“We hear everything,” said Magobet. “'I lost it’ is the biggest one. There’s ‘I left it at home,’ ‘I thought I didn’t need it,’ everything.”
For the record, they … don’t work.
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