Let's break down the absurdity. The 24 runs smaller buses because it has to navigate the steep grades through Castro and Noe Valley. Fine — that's a geographic constraint. But SFMTA knows this. They've known it for years. And yet the route remains dramatically under-served relative to how many people depend on it. As one SF resident put it, "The route is just too popular for the resources it gets. It's a complicated route with a small bus and no dedicated lanes."

Afternoons are especially brutal. When a local charter school lets out, the bus becomes virtually unusable. Riders report stops where dozens of students are waiting, doors that can't open because passengers are packed against them, and a general sense that this is a transit system that has simply given up on optimizing anything. One local recalled that roughly 20 years ago, SFMTA actually ran short-loop 24 buses between 18th and Geary specifically to handle the crush. If that's true — and several riders remember it — it means the agency once had a smarter solution and abandoned it.

Then there's the speed problem. Divisadero crosses nearly every major east-west artery in the city — Geary, Fell, Oak, Haight, you name it — and the 24 hits a red light at almost every one. No signal priority. No dedicated bus lanes. Just a bus full of increasingly frustrated San Franciscans inching through intersections while SFMTA collects the same fares and delivers objectively worse service.

The standard response from transit apologists is always the same: we need more money. But SFMTA's budget has ballooned over the past decade while service quality has stagnated or declined. This isn't a revenue problem — it's a priorities problem. When you're spending millions on bureaucratic overhead and pet projects while one of your most-ridden corridors operates like a clown car on a roller coaster, something is deeply wrong with how you allocate resources.

Riders shouldn't have to concoct three-transfer workarounds involving the 38R to Van Ness to the 49 just to get from the Richmond to the Mission. Fix the frequency. Add the short-loop runs. Give Divisadero some signal priority. This isn't rocket science — it's basic transit management. The only thing missing is the will to do it.