The five-year reign of SF Municipal Transit Authority director Jeffrey Tumlin ends today, and in an exit interview, he points the finger at rideshares and robotaxis for Muni’s $300 million deficit.

We noted earlier this month that the head honcho of the SF Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) Jeffrey Tumlin announced he was resigning from his post after five years on the job. And this being December 31, today is his last day in the position. Tumlin took over right before COVID hit, so obviously he was going to face a difficult tenure for reasons beyond his control. But he was still a lightning rod for criticism, largely because of an ill-conceived Valencia Street bike lane experiment, his car-free leanings that infuriated morists, and oh, that $320 million Muni deficit that he’s leaving behind.

The Chronicle gave Tumlin a wide-ranging exit interview as he leaves office, and he (perhaps correctly) notes that some of the COVID-era changes have improved Muni. And he does have some pretty good rider satisfaction numbers to back up his case.

“We completely abandoned bus schedules,” Tumlin told the Chronicle. “And we turned on this technology called headway management, which we’d had for a decade but never used. Headway management gives the operator information about how many minutes ahead the bus in front of them, and how many minutes behind the bus behind them is.”

The change stuck. “We’re the only transit system in the world that uses headway management at scale for all of our main lines,” he added. “The buses that run every 30 minutes — those run on a schedule. But if the buses run every 10 minutes or better, we just ask the operators to space themselves out.”

So arguably, the buses are running a little more efficiently since COVID. But that may not last, given that the enormous budget deficit may eliminate a number of Muni lines, or slash the buses’ frequency. And Tumlin thinks that the likes of Uber, Lyft, and Waymo are in large part responsible for that deficit.

“The SFMTA owns nearly a dozen [parking] garages in the downtown area, some of which are sitting mostly empty. All of that money used to go to fund Muni,” Tumlin said. “In addition, the SFMTA has a 25% parking sales tax on all private commercial garages in the downtown. Those are also sitting empty. It’s downtown office buildings that are not full of people, but it’s also Union Square suffering from a loss of regional shoppers."

It might be a stretch to say that rideshares are why people aren’t parking downtown, considering that people aren’t going downtown so much anymore. But Tumlin does make additional correct points that rideshares increase traffic congestion. Waymos, for instance, are just out there driving all the time, even when they don’t have a fare.

According to Tumlin, rideshares “reduce the ability of the San Francisco street network to move people, if they’re getting in the way of walking, biking and transit.” He added that “Uber, Lyft and now Waymo are a big part of why Muni funding is down.”

You might be tempted to say that rideshares are just more economically viable than Muni, but realize that Uber and Lyft burned through a ton of money themselves, and have had the benefit of (nearly) endless investor money. But the fact is that the damned things are here to stay, and whoever runs the SFMTA next is going to have to reimagine the agency’s model and adapt to this reality.

So who runs the SFMTA next? Tumlin will be replaced by current SFMTA director of transit Julie Kirschbaum, and Mayor-elect Daniel Lurie will have his pick for a permanent new director of the SFMTA.

Related: SFMTA Director Jeffrey Tumlin is Resigning at the End of the Year [SFist]

Image: @jeffreytumlin via Twitter