"Good afternoon everyone, thank you so much for joining us today to mourn and celebrate the life of our Bay Area public transportation. Right now we are anxious, sad, and afraid because of what our future holds, for the loss of our transit services, for the jobs and the its economic benefits, for the loss of access to essential services, and for the loss of one of our tools to help fight climate change. Public transportation is what gave life in the bay area. It connected us to our work, to our needs, to our entertainment, to our communities, to our food, and to our recreational spots and many other essentials. It gave us life. My mother years ago visited me for the first time. Her first Muni bus ride, was the 5 Fulton and we headed towards Alamo Square — in hindsight, we should have taken the 21-Hayes. She thought being with many different people in the bus was very cool and she got comfortable taking it. On that visit, we used the F-Line, obviously the Cable Car - which was my first time as well, We took the N-Judah to Ocean Beach, and then BART to Daly City — again in hindsight, we should have taken the ferry too! My intention then was to boast about how great our transit system compared to what they have in Texas - where you had to drive everywhere and they didn’t even have sidewalks! She visited me again here over a year ago where she made it a point to explore the city on her own using public transit. To get to know San Francisco even more — she used it to track down those beautiful mosaic tiled stairs spread around the city — she was able to get to 3 of them but she will come back to find the others. I tell you this story because it was a good example on how someone who was used to taking cars everywhere can switch to using public transportation if the services existed. A few years ago the Tenderloin led the organizing to restore the 31-Balboa where we realized that it was not only OUR line, it was other neighborhoods’ line. It helped break this Tenderloin-centric bubble we had and exposed us that public transportation is for everybody, especially if the services existed. We wanted all the lines restored, we wanted it to be expanded to make it better than it ever was, not because it was something just for us in the Tenderloin, but it was for everyone in the city, the Bay area, and all who visits. All of us here have many stories about public transportation and these stories show how much our lives are affected by it. In a lot of eulogies, we hear this trope: nobody really dies until we stop telling stories about them. For our public transportation, we don’t want to relegate it to just stories, we want it to exist because we can keep it going, we just need the political will, the leadership, and that bridge funding from the State of California.. Let us come together, let us fight for the life of our transit, let us fight for the people whose lives will be drastically affected with the loss of these transit services - for the jobs in transit, the economic benefits that it provided, for the access it provided for many people, and for the way of life that public transit gave us. Let’s do it for us, let’s do it for the Bay area, and let’s do it for our planet. Can I get an AMEN!" | 
