Julie Kirschbaum, New SFMTA Boss And Inglesider, Talks Transit

With just over 100 days under her belt, Julie Kirschbaum is guiding the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency through a tricky budget cycle with a positive Midwest attitude and focus on accountability.

Kirschbaum, a native of Minnesota, went from SFMTA’s acting director of transportation when Jeffrey Tumlin left at the end of 2024 to being permanently appointed to the role in February 2025 by Mayor Daniel Lurie. But she is no stranger to the SFMTA system and has been a part of the agency since 2007, where she led the Transit Effectiveness Study before becoming the director of transit in 2018.

“It's been the honor of a lifetime,” Kirschbaum said. “It's an agency that I am super committed to. It's work that I'm really passionate about.”

Kirschbaum, who holds degrees from Boston University and MIT, found herself in California after college working in Santa Cruz for a small company that focused on creating disability-friendly transportation and sidewalks.

She eventually moved to the SFMTA and worked on projects designed to improve the ridership experience, including delivering the agency’s highest customer ratings in over 20 years and co-developing the Muni Service Equity Strategy, a plan for correcting historical inequities in transit investments and prioritizing the needs of historically underserved communities.

“Part of why we are seeing such strong customer ratings is that everything we are doing right now for the service is focused on speed, frequency, reliability, cleanliness, and safety,” Kirschbaum said. “By focusing on those areas and having measurable improvements in all of those areas, we've become a system that people can rely on and trust.”

When she isn’t leading the entirety of SFMTA, she resides in Ingleside with her husband and two kids, going to all their favorite spots like Beep’s Burgers, Ocean Ale House and Chase Luck Bakery and riding her favorite lines: the 14R-Mission Rapid, 29-Sunset and K-Ingleside.

She and her family moved to the neighborhood from the Mission during the pandemic for a little more space.

“We love it because the businesses all feel super local and it still has everything you need, except for the Walgreens, which I am devastated about, but then we have this beautiful neighborhood that we can walk our dog in and say hi to everyone,” Kirschbaum said. “It's just been a really great experience for us.”

The Ingleside Light met with Kirschbaum to see how she is settling in as SFMTA’s new boss.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did it feel to be appointed as the next director of transportation?

First of all, it's like a huge honor. I mean, it is really like the role of a lifetime, and I'm really, really proud. It was also terrifying and overwhelming on some days. My family has been incredibly supportive, and the staff here have been incredibly supportive. [SFMTA Public Information Officer] Michael Roccaforte’s been helping me tell our story and get the word out about our work. We also have staff helping me understand the areas that I was less familiar with. Everybody at the agency is really committed to stability and to excellent work right now and that's made this piece of it a pleasure.

What is something from your time at SFMTA that you are bringing with you into this role, and then what is something you're doing differently?

One of the things that I am going to try to bring into this role is really celebrating the small wins. When some of our projects are multi-year [and] really complex, some of the things can take a long time, but there are small victories like getting to go out with kids and do daylight painting,  for example. We're trying to do daylighting citywide, but we're celebrating the fact that we're 50% done with all of the intersections around our schools. I think celebrating small wins is something that I'm trying to bring with me. 

I think I'm a little work in progress on what I want to leave behind. I make dozens of mistakes every day. I think as long as you learn quickly from them, it's the right way to approach the work.

Is there anything you can share about the future of the K-Ingleside light rail?

We're really excited to work closely with Supervisor Myrna Melgar and a lot of different community groups to work on a K-Ingleside Muni Forward Project so the longer platforms that you're seeing are part of that project. We're working on getting in a transit lane and just other things that will help prioritize the reliability of the train but also pedestrian safety, which is a really high priority for a lot of groups in that area.

As you know, Ingleside's quite the Muni hub. We have the City College Terminal and the Green Yard. Any insights about that?

I think we are seeing a post-Covid shift from downtown as the main transit hub to a city that has a lot of smaller interconnected transit hubs. The City College-Balboa Park area is such a rich transit network. I think it provides a lot of mobility for people living and working in the area, but then it also connects with SF State and then also connects with West Portal and then into the downtown. I think we are seeing a lot of strong ridership on routes like the 49, for example, which serves City College and serves the Ingleside. We don't even measure ridership as pre- or post-COVID anymore on that route because the ridership is so strong. I think that kind of idea of neighborhood transit hubs has been a key part of our success in restoring ridership and also get people excited to get back on Muni.