Muni is cutting service on five S.F. bus lines. Here's when the changes go live
Once the changes take effect, the 6-Haight-Parnassus and 21-Hayes buses will combine to form the 6-Hayes-Parnassus. Buses on this new route will loop back at the Market and Hyde Street stop near Civic Center. On weekdays, the 5-Fulton and 9-San Bruno will also turn around at Market, an adjustment Muni made because each of them have parallel lines that are largely redundant.
Additionally, Muni will pare back the 31-Balboa route so that it runs from Cabrillo and La Playa streets near Ocean Beach to Fifth and Market streets downtown.
These austerity measures will save $7.2 million, a small piece of the transit system's budget deficit that's expected to balloon to $322 million next fiscal year. If the city doesn't find new sources of revenue to patch that hole, Muni's next round of cuts could be crippling, warned SFMTA director of transportation Julie Kirschbaum.
'We are making small changes now to avoid devastating long-term cuts and changes,' Kirschbaum said. She and others are confronting worst-case scenarios in which the city drastically slashes transit service, leaving commuters stranded and causing nightmare traffic jams.
Yet, even a relatively cautious reduction to bus service faced pushback in San Francisco. The new turnarounds will force some commuters to make transfers to reach their destinations, an inconvenience that could stymie people with mobility issues. Critics often note that transfers also create a psychological barrier that dissuades people from riding transit.
During an April 15 public hearing at which the SFMTA Board of Directors approved the new service plan, transit advocates warned that it sent a grim message to the public.
Many people would perceive the cuts as a sign of weakness, and intuit that 'public transit is not in the ascendancy, it is in the decline,' advocate Cyrus Hall said. He urged the board to postpone any claw-backs to service as city and state leaders rally public support for tax measures to bolster Muni and other transit systems.
Kirschbaum said her agency is being pragmatic and minimizing pain for riders. For example, Muni will preserve resources by merging the 6-Haight-Parnassus and 21-Hayes routes, as both individual lines have underperformed since the pandemic. Data from SFMTA shows a 21% ridership recovery for the 21 when comparing April this year to the same month in 2019. The 6 recouped 56% of ridership across the same period.
Transfers 'are really the only trade-off that customers are making at this point,' Kirschbaum said, noting that the current plan cuts costs while maintaining all bus connections and frequency.
'Making this small 2% change today will help fortify us as we face this larger challenge,' Kirschbaum said.
Meanwhile, SFMTA staff are scrounging up money in other ways, such as raising the price of metered parking, pausing some capital projects and ending certain contracts. As budget officials trim around the edges, politicians aim to put multiple transit tax measures on the ballot next year, imploring voters for help.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
USA Today
34 minutes ago
- USA Today
Gabbard: ODNI to slash costs, workforce by 40% as part of major intel agency overhaul
Gabbard said ODNI 'must make serious changes' to combat 'abuse of power, unauthorized leaks ... and politicized weaponization' of U.S. intel agencies. WASHINGTON – Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced Aug. 20 that her office overseeing all U.S. intelligence agencies will undergo a massive reorganization and slash its spending by 40% to combat "abuse of power" and "politicized weaponization of intelligence." Gabbard called the overhaul ODNI 2.0 in a news release, and its broad contours suggest it is the biggest restructuring of the agency since it was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist acts to improve intelligence sharing and operations. One of its goals is "reduce bloat by nearly 50%," in a reference to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's workforce. The move is expected to save taxpayers over $700 million annually and better enable ODNI to focus on 'fulfilling its critical role of serving as the central hub for intelligence integration, strategic guidance, and oversight over the Intelligence Community,' said the late afternoon news release. 'Over the last 20 years, ODNI has become bloated and inefficient, and the intelligence community is rife with abuse of power, unauthorized leaks of classified intelligence, and politicized weaponization of intelligence,' Gabbard said in the release. 'ODNI and the IC must make serious changes to fulfill its responsibility to the American people and the U.S. Constitution by focusing on our core mission: find the truth and provide objective, unbiased, timely intelligence to the President and policymakers.' Intel agency long a focus of Trump's ire The ODNI was established in April 2005 after the blue ribbon 9/11 Commission exposed systemic failures across the intelligence community. Its purpose was to integrate intelligence from – and provide oversight over – all of the various intel elements of the U.S. government, including the CIA, the eavesdropping National Security Agency and several military intelligence agencies. Trump has frequently attacked the agency as politicized against him, and has vowed, along with Gabbard, to downsize and restructure it. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, sponsored legislation June 27 to cap the ODNI staff at 650, down from what he said was about 1,600, to eliminate certain reporting requirements and to transfer some key counterintelligence and counterproliferation responsibilities back to the CIA. The ODNI news release said ODNI 2.0 will eliminate redundant missions, functions and personnel, and make 'critical investments in areas that support the President's national intelligence priorities.' It will also expose what President Donald Trump and Gabbard have called the politicization and weaponization of intelligence, and hold 'bad actors accountable.' Going after those involved in 'Russia Hoax' That effort expands on a campaign that Gabbard already has launched to investigate Democrats in the Obama and Biden administrations that she claims falsified intelligence to concoct a false 'Russia Hoax' about Trump complicity in the Kremlin's interference in the 2016 election. Multiple investigations and reports, including a bipartisan effort by the Senate Intelligence Committee, have found that Russia did indeed meddle in the 2016 election to help Trump defeat his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. One key target of the new overhaul is the ODNI's efforts to call out Russia for continued interference in U.S. elections, including the 2024 president campaign, through its multi-agency Foreign Malign Influence Center or FMIC. Refocusing FMIC's mission will save American taxpayers at least $7 million per year, according to an ODNI 2.0 fact sheet released by the spy agency. It did not provide details of what that refocus will entail, or a similar plan to overhaul the ODNI's National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center (NCBC) and its Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center (CTIIC). 'ODNI's hyper-focus on election-related work notably began in 2017, immediately following the publication of the manufactured Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) falsely alleging Putin 'aspired' to help President Trump win the 2016 election,' the fact sheet said. 'No confidence' Gabbard is right person to conduct ODNI overhaul Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat and vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, acknowledged in a statement that there is broad, bipartisan agreement that the ODNI 'is in need of thoughtful reform.' The current Intelligence Authorization Act directs Gabbard to submit a plan to Congress outlining her proposed changes, Warner said, 'and we will carefully review her proposals and conduct rigorous oversight to ensure any reforms strengthen, not weaken, our national security.' 'But given Director Gabbard's track record of politicizing intelligence – including her decision just yesterday to revoke security clearances from career national security officials – I have no confidence that she is the right person to carry out this weighty responsibility," Warner said. Gabbard announced Aug. 19 that Trump had directed her office to revoke security clearances from 37 former intelligence officials for 'politicizing and manipulating intelligence.' Most were affiliated with the Biden and Obama administrations or signatories to public protests of Trump's policies. Warner and other Democrats have also criticized Gabbard for forming a task force that amounts to nothing less than a "witch hunt" for officers and analysts within the 18 U.S. intelligence agencies it deems disloyal to Trump. Cotton, the committee chair, called ODNI 2.0 'an important step to return the department to its original size, scope and mission.' 'I look forward to working with @DNIGabbard to implement these reforms and ensuring the IC focuses on its core mission: stealing secrets from our adversaries,' Cotton said in a post on X. This story has been updated to include additional information.
Miami Herald
4 hours ago
- Miami Herald
Michael Hiltzik: Say farewell to the AI bubble, and get ready for the crash
Most people not deeply involved in the artificial intelligence frenzy may not have noticed, but perceptions of AI's relentless march toward becoming more intelligent than humans, even becoming a threat to humanity, came to a screeching halt Aug. 7. That was the day when the most widely followed AI company, OpenAI, released GPT-5, an advanced product that the firm had long promised would put competitors to shame and launch a new revolution in this purportedly revolutionary technology. As it happened, GPT-5 was a bust. It turned out to be less user-friendly and in many ways less capable than its predecessors in OpenAI's arsenal. It made the same sort of risible errors in answering users' prompts, was no better in math (or even worse), and not at all the advance that OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, had been talking up. "The thought was that this growth would be exponential," says Alex Hanna, a technology critic and co-author (with Emily M. Bender of the University of Washington) of the indispensable new book "The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want." "Instead, Hanna says, "We're hitting a wall." The consequences go beyond how so many business leaders and ordinary Americans have been led to expect, even fear, the penetration of AI into our lives. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been invested by venture capitalists and major corporations such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft in OpenAI and its multitude of fellow AI labs, even though none of the AI labs has turned a profit. Public companies have scurried to announce AI investments or claim AI capabilities for their products in the hope of turbocharging their share prices, much as an earlier generation of businesses promoted themselves as "dot-coms" in the 1990s to look more glittery in investors' eyes. Nvidia, the maker of a high-powered chip powering AI research, plays almost the same role as a stock market leader that Intel Corp., another chip-maker, played in the 1990s - helping to prop up the bull market in equities. If the promise of AI turns out to be as much of a mirage as dot-coms did, stock investors may face a painful reckoning. The cheerless rollout of GPT-5 could bring the day of reckoning closer. "AI companies are really buoying the American economy right now, and it's looking very bubble-shaped," Hanna told me. The rollout was so disappointing that it shined a spotlight on the degree that the whole AI industry has been dependent on hype. Here's Altman, speaking just before the unveiling of GPT-5, comparing it with its immediate predecessor, GPT-4o: "GPT-4o maybe it was like talking to a college student," he said. "With GPT-5 now it's like talking to an expert - a legitimate PhD-level expert in anything any area you need on demand ... whatever your goals are." Well, not so much. When one user asked it to produce a map of the U.S. with all the states labeled, GPT-5 extruded a fantasyland, including states such as Tonnessee, Mississipo and West Wigina. Another prompted the model for a list of the first 12 presidents, with names and pictures. It only came up with nine, including presidents Gearge Washington, John Quincy Adama and Thomason Jefferson. Experienced users of the new version's predecessor models were appalled, not least by OpenAI's decision to shut down access to its older versions and force users to rely on the new one. "GPT5 is horrible," wrote a user on Reddit. "Short replies that are insufficient, more obnoxious ai stylized talking, less 'personality' … and we don't have the option to just use other models." (OpenAI quickly relented, reopening access to the older versions.) The tech media was also unimpressed. "A bit of a dud," judged the website Futurism and Ars Technica termed the rollout "a big mess." I asked OpenAI to comment on the dismal public reaction to GPT-5, but didn't hear back. None of this means that the hype machine underpinning most public expectations of AI has taken a breather. Rather, it remains in overdrive. A projection of AI's development over the coming years published by something called the AI Futures Project under the title "AI 2027" states: "We predict that the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution." The rest of the document, mapping a course to late 2027 when an AI agent "finally understands its own cognition," is so loopily over the top that I wondered whether it wasn't meant as a parody of excessive AI hype. I asked its creators if that was so, but haven't received a reply. One problem underscored by GPT-5's underwhelming rollout is that it exploded one of the most cherished principles of the AI world, which is that "scaling up" - endowing the technology with more computing power and more data - would bring the grail of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, ever closer to reality. That's the principle undergirding the AI industry's vast expenditures on data centers and high-performance chips. The demand for more data and more data-crunching capabilities will require about $3 trillion in capital just by 2028, in the estimation of Morgan Stanley. That would outstrip the capacity of the global credit and derivative securities markets. But if AI won't scale up, most if not all that money will be wasted. As Bender and Hanna point out in their book, AI promoters have kept investors and followers enthralled by relying on a vague public understanding of the term "intelligence." AI bots seem intelligent, because they've achieved the ability to seem coherent in their use of language. But that's different from cognition. "So we're imagining a mind behind the words," Hanna says, "and that becomes associated with consciousness or intelligence. But the notion of general intelligence is not really well-defined." Indeed, as long ago as the 1960s, that phenomenon was noticed by Joseph Weizenbaum, the designer of the pioneering chatbot ELIZA, which replicated the responses of a psychotherapist so convincingly that even test subjects who knew they were conversing with a machine thought it displayed emotions and empathy. "What I had not realized," Weizenbaum wrote in 1976, "is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people." Weizenbaum warned that the "reckless anthropomorphization of the computer" - that is, treating it as some sort of thinking companion - produced a "simpleminded view of intelligence." That tendency has been exploited by today's AI promoters. They label the frequent mistakes and fabrications produced by AI bots as "hallucinations," which suggests that the bots have perceptions that may have gone slightly awry. But the bots "don't have perceptions," Bender and Hanna write, "and suggesting that they do is yet more unhelpful anthropomorphization." The general public may finally be cottoning on to the failed promise of AI more generally. Predictions that AI will lead to large-scale job losses in creative and STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math) might inspire feelings that the whole enterprise was a tech-industry scam from the outset. Predictions that AI would yield a burst of increased worker productivity haven't been fulfilled; in many fields, productivity declines, in part because workers have to be deployed to double-check AI outputs, lest their mistakes or fabrications find their way into mission-critical applications - legal briefs incorporating nonexistent precedents, medical prescriptions with life-threatening ramifications and so on. Some economists are dashing cold water on predictions of economic gains more generally. MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, for example, forecast last year that AI would produce an increase of only about 0.5% in U.S. productivity and an increase of about 1% in gross domestic product over the next 10 years, mere fractions of the AI camp's projections. The value of Bender's and Hanna's book, and the lesson of GPT-5, is that they remind us that "artificial intelligence" isn't a scientific term or an engineering term. It's a marketing term. And that's true of all the chatter about AI eventually taking over the world. "Claims around consciousness and sentience are a tactic to sell you on AI," Bender and Hanna write. So, too, is the talk about the billions, or trillions, to be made in AI. As with any technology, the profits will go to a small cadre, while the rest of us pay the price ... unless we gain a much clearer perception of what AI is, and more importantly, what it isn't. Copyright (C) 2025, Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Portions copyrighted by the respective providers.
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Yahoo
KBRA Assigns Preliminary Ratings to RRE 6 Loan Management DAC (Reset)
LONDON, August 20, 2025--(BUSINESS WIRE)--KBRA UK (KBRA) assigns preliminary ratings to five classes of refinancing notes issued by RRE 6 Loan Management DAC, a cash flow collateralised loan obligation (CLO) backed primarily by a diversified portfolio of Euro-denominated corporate loans. RRE 6 Loan Management DAC is managed by Redding Ridge Asset Management (UK) LLP ("RRAM UK" or the"collateral manager"). The CLO originally closed in March 2021. This transaction will reset the terms of the CLO, including the stated maturity, non-call period, reinvestment period, note interest rates and notional balances. Proceeds from the issuance of the new CLO notes will be used to redeem the outstanding notes in full and to purchase new assets. The CLO will have a 4.5-year reinvestment period and a 13-year legal final. The ratings reflect initial credit enhancement levels, coverage tests including par value and interest coverage tests, excess spread, and a reinvestment overcollateralisation test. The collateral in RRE 6 Loan Management DAC will mainly consist of broadly syndicated leveraged loans and bonds issued by corporate obligors diversified across sectors. The target portfolio par amount is €400.0 million with exposures to 162 obligors. The obligors in the portfolio have a K-WARF of 2451, which represents a weighted average portfolio assessment of approximately B. RRAM UK is a UK-based subsidiary of Redding Ridge Asset Management LLC, an independent asset management company established and seeded by Apollo Global Credit Management, LLC (Apollo) in 2016 to manage CLOs. The RRAM UK management arm currently manages more than €8.6 billion in assets across nineteen European CLOs. The rating on the Class A-2-R Note considers the timely payment of interest and ultimate payment of principal by the applicable stated maturity date, while the ratings on the Class B-R, C-1-R, C-2-R and D-R Notes consider the ultimate payment of interest and principal by the applicable stated maturity date. To access ratings and relevant documents, click here. Click here to view the report. Methodologies Structured Credit: Structured Credit Global Rating Methodology Structured Finance: Global Structured Finance Counterparty Methodology ESG Global Rating Methodology Disclosures Further information on key credit considerations, sensitivity analyses that consider what factors can affect these credit ratings and how they could lead to an upgrade or a downgrade, and ESG factors (where they are a key driver behind the change to the credit rating or rating outlook) can be found in the full rating report referenced above. A description of all substantially material sources that were used to prepare the credit rating and information on the methodology(ies) (inclusive of any material models and sensitivity analyses of the relevant key rating assumptions, as applicable) used in determining the credit rating is available in the Information Disclosure Form(s) located here. Information on the meaning of each rating category can be located here. This credit rating is endorsed by Kroll Bond Rating Agency Europe Limited for use in the European Union. Information on a credit rating's endorsement status is available on its rating page at Further disclosures relating to this rating action are available in the Information Disclosure Form(s) referenced above. Additional information regarding KBRA policies, methodologies, rating scales and disclosures are available at There are certain issuers, entities or transactions rated by KBRA Europe or KBRA UK that may be or have relationships with Shareholders and/or Shareholder-Related Companies, as that term is defined in KBRA's Shareholder and Shareholder Related Companies for KBRA Europe and KBRA UK Policy and Procedure. Relevant disclosure information may be found here. About KBRA UK Kroll Bond Rating Agency, LLC (KBRA), one of the major credit rating agencies (CRA), is a full-service CRA registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as an NRSRO. Kroll Bond Rating Agency Europe Limited is registered as a CRA with the European Securities and Markets Authority. Kroll Bond Rating Agency UK Limited is registered as a CRA with the UK Financial Conduct Authority. In addition, KBRA is designated as a Designated Rating Organization (DRO) by the Ontario Securities Commission for issuers of asset-backed securities to file a short form prospectus or shelf prospectus. KBRA is also recognized as a Qualified Rating Agency by Taiwan's Financial Supervisory Commission and is recognized by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners as a Credit Rating Provider (CRP) in the U.S. Kroll Bond Rating Agency UK is located at 1 Connaught Place, 2nd Floor London, England. Doc ID: 1010921 View source version on Contacts Analytical Contacts Gabriele Gramazio, Senior Director (Lead Analyst)+44 20 8148 HyunKyeong Kim, Associate Director+1 Jerry Jurcisin, Director+1 Eric Hudson, Senior Managing Director, Co-Head of Global Structured Credit (Rating Committee Chair)+1 Business Development Contacts Miten Amin, Managing Director+44 20 8148 Mauricio Noé, Co-Head of Europe+44 20 8148 Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data
