Muni drivers now need to ask their bosses’ permission to pee. And they’re not happy about it.
Bus, cable car, and train operators must check in with higher-ups before taking a “personal necessity break,” San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency management wrote Friday in a memo to Muni drivers obtained by The Standard.
The SFMTA is trying to curtail what it sees as operators taking overly long breaks due to previously lax rules — a practice that is delaying transit operations.
The edict came alongside a bevy of other new restrictions: Breaks are now 15 minutes (they were around 20 minutes, with fewer caveats), and no shopping, smoking, eating, or use of personal electronic devices is allowed.
Some operators told The Standard the regulations infantilize workers and restrict their rights. Anthony Ballester, president of Transport Workers Union Local 250A, is urging members not to sign forms that allow the agency to enforce the new rules. The union plans to fight for a reversal of the rules.
“This is definitely killing morale,” Ballester told The Standard.
While the bladder battle may prompt a snicker, the new rules may affect transit riders.
The SFMTA is facing a $322 million budget deficit, leading it to curtail bus routes downtown. The agency found that Muni operator breaks cause buses to be out of service for 400 hours every month, according to an internal analysis conducted between January 2023 and March 2024. The outages cost the agency $1.6 million annually, it said.
“That’s a remarkable number of service hours taken out of the system due to breaks,” said Parisa Safarzadeh, head of communications at SFMTA. “We’re a customer service organization, and we have to deliver good service every day.”
Drivers and union reps hit back with claims that panicked operators would be forced to race buses along streets to find bathrooms.
The new 15-minute requirement counts finding a bathroom, after all, not just using it.
And bus driver pressure can lead to bladder pressure.
Wearing adult diapers is a common practice for some operators nationally, with one 2019 survey finding 25% of had reported soiling themselves while behind the wheel. The same was true for Muni more than a decade ago, when bathrooms were scarce at the end of bus lines, drivers told The Standard. The SFMTA also tried cracking down on breaks nine years ago and got similar pushback, resulting in the agency flushing the planned changes.
“They spent too many years ‘turning and burning,’ not taking a bathroom break when they should have,” due to agency pressure, one operator recalled, leading to “years of bladder abuse” and incontinence.
That problem was alleviated when the agency built free-standing bathrooms and secured agreements for others over the last decade. SFMTA even convened an Operator Restroom Task Force in 2012 to ensure drivers got relief. But more restrooms are needed; not all routes have enough identified, drivers said.
Muni workers speaking to The Standard feared the new rules would cause undue bladder pressure once again and curtail their time to eat, stretch after hours behind the wheel, or call their families when needed.
Muni driver Loree Woods-Bowman works the agency’s “extra board,” filling in on bus lines across the city. She’s seen a few colleagues cause frustration by taking extra-long breaks, but they’re a minority, she said. The agency’s research shows the median operator’s break is about 14 minutes, and roughly half of all “necessity breaks” are asked for by just 9% of all operators.
“They should punish those who are abusing the 702s and let it be a lesson to those about abuse,” Woods-Bowman said, referring to the code operators use for a personal break. “And leave the ones who aren’t doing that alone. It’s not fair.”
Solutions may be slow going. Everyone, it seems, is pissed.