It’s San Francisco’s Most Delayed Bus. For Riders, a Frustrating Problem May Get Worse

Maria Castillo huddled under her umbrella on San Francisco’s Cortland Street as she waited for her bus in the frigid rain.

“It’s so cold right now,” the 56-year-old told KQED in Spanish earlier this month, drawing her two-wheeled cart full of cleaning supplies close. “I’m dealing with a lot of cold.”

Castillo, who lives in the Bayview neighborhood, relies on Muni’s 67-Bernal Heights route to reach her house cleaning job by Precita Park. She often sees familiar faces on the squat, 30-foot bus, which snakes up and around Bernal Heights Park and down to the 24th Street Mission BART station.

The friendliness of the passengers and drivers usually makes for a calm morning commute. But on days like these, she’s frustrated when the bus keeps her waiting.

“The only problem is the delay,” Castillo said. “Sometimes half an hour passes.”

Castillo’s experience on the 67 bus — a hilly loop that takes just 25 minutes to complete and serves public housing on Ellsworth Street as well as the Alemany Farmer’s Market — is not out of the ordinary. The route is the most likely to be delayed, with 1 in 5 buses departing “very late,” according to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s on-time performance dashboard.

In fact, only 40% of the route’s buses were on time between October 2024 and October 2025, according to the dashboard. That’s a far cry from the 85% goal set by a voter mandate in 1999 with Proposition E, which created SFMTA.

“I noticed there’s a gap between pickups,” said Gil Diaz, 42, who catches the bus from the same corner as Castillo to connect to 24th Street BART as part of his morning commute. “If I miss one bus, I could be waiting 20–30 minutes for the next one, maybe longer. I get that anxiety like, oh, every minute is counting, because it’s going to affect the next bus.”

The SFMTA attributed the delays to the sharp turns and treacherously tight streets that the 67 navigates as it inches along Bernal Heights Boulevard. More slowdowns come from traffic around 24th Street. The agency denied that operator shortages or vehicle availability were responsible for service issues.

“We’re always trying to improve,” said Brent Jones, SFMTA’s director of transit. “People should know that we are always working to expand our service, to make it efficient. Even at times where we have budgetary constraints, we are already thinking about what building back better looks like.”

Those looming budget cuts threaten to make waits for the 67 longer or eliminate the route entirely. Because of exhausted state and federal funding, rising costs, and lower fare and parking revenue, the agency faces a $322 million budget deficit beginning in July, one that will continue to grow over the next five years.

In addition to a wide range of street safety, maintenance and staff reductions, SFMTA said it will be forced to reduce Muni service if that budget gap isn’t plugged.

The agency’s worst-case scenario includes suspending up to 12 low-ridership routes without parallel service in hilly neighborhoods of the city, including the 67. While the route serves a modest 800 daily riders, they represent a diverse swath of residents — many of whom live on the steep streets above Alemany Boulevard or near Bernal Heights Park, and who rely on the bus to navigate the area’s sharp grades.

“That’s the trade-off,” said Jaime Viloria, outreach manager for advocacy group SF Transit Riders. “Do you just put all the resources on your core services with the most usage, or do you spread it around a little bit more? You make those choices about which communities get their transit and which ones don’t. That’s the difficult part of what the SFMTA has to do.”

As SFMTA looks to strike that balance, Jones said that for the most part, the agency has moved away from using schedules to measure the reliability of its service, especially for its busier trains and buses.

Since the pandemic, about half of all city transit switched from tracking specific departure times to what transit agencies call “headway management” — a frequency-based system that prioritizes even space between buses, instead of keeping them on a schedule.

The idea is to create fewer gaps in service between buses and to avoid having buses bunch up at a stop at the same time, leaving future riders stranded. Passengers on high-volume lines should expect buses and trains to come at regular intervals, instead of at fixed times.

According to the SFMTA, the agency averages an 85% to 87% headway adherence rate. Data for January 2025, the most recent made available to KQED, shows that the 38R-Geary, the 28R-19th Avenue and the 14R-Mission — all Rapid routes that served a combined 54,100 riders daily in December 2025 — averaged higher than 90% adherence to their headway targets.

By comparison, SFMTA’s lower-volume Muni buses, such as the 67, still run on the old schedule system. Collectively, only 56% of those buses departed on time between October 2024 and October 2025.

The agency acknowledged that headway data is not included on the city’s public transit performance dashboard and that Muni’s “percentage of trips with service gaps” data, which formerly tracked headway arrivals, has not been published publicly since 2021. That’s even though its 1999 charter also included a mandate to make the performance metrics accessible to the public.

While SFMTA and city leaders are committed to avoiding service cuts, officials face a funding quagmire that’s growing each year. Although Gov. Gavin Newsom authorized a $590 million bridge loan to Bay Area transit agencies in early February, that money will be split between the region’s operators — and is only a stopgap before the coming fiscal cliff.

State officials have pushed for a regional transit tax to fund the Bay Area’s largest transit agencies — BART, Caltrain, Muni and AC Transit. The measure proposes a 1% sales tax increase in San Francisco and a 0.5% increase in Alameda, San Mateo, Contra Costa and Santa Clara counties. SFMTA is expected to see about $155 million in revenue from that tax each year.

And in November, San Francisco residents will vote on a parcel tax to shore up SFMTA funding, which is expected to generate more than $180 million yearly to address the deficit.

If passed, the stabilizing effects of these measures would ripple across the Bay Area for some transit riders.

Mano Ram is the area director for security at the Alemany Apartments public housing complex. To reach his home in Belmont, he rides the 67 to 24th Street BART, which connects him to Caltrain through Millbrae. Sometimes, delays leave him stranded for 45 minutes to over an hour, resulting in a two-hour commute to travel 20 miles.

Still, he said, without the bus, “I would be stuck. I would have to rent a car.”