Those who get around San Francisco mostly on foot, bike or bus are already enamored with Jeffrey Tumlin.

Those who do a lot of driving? He’ll probably drive them crazy. And that’s a good thing.

Tumlin will become director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency on Dec. 16, and he’s already rocking the boat — er, bus? — in pretty much every way.

The 50-year-old Noe Valley resident is wrapping up his job as principal at the transportation consulting firm Nelson\Nygaard and has gained sudden Twitter fame in local transportation circles for being funny, bold and blunt.

Like when he speculated about whether it was appropriate to indulge his “’70s queer boy aspiration to be Maya from ‘Space 1999’ to vanquish motorists who block the box.” (For the uninitiated, such as myself, she’s a character from a sci-fi TV show, and in the picture he tweeted, she’s wielding a laser gun. Drivers, enter an intersection only if there’s space for you on the other side! Please!)

On a more serious note, he asked on Twitter why not paying Muni fare can get you slapped with a $125 fine, but not paying at a parking meter sets you back just $76.

Tumlin, who’s married to a Dutch jewelry maker and meditates daily, rode the bus to the Chronicle newsroom the other day for a recording of our “San Francisco City Insider” podcast. He was late (like I said, he rode the bus), but he made up for it with a wide-ranging, sometimes eye-popping conversation.

His style, as he put it, includes “a lot of directness and honesty and some strategic humor and the right dose of outrageousness.”

He’ll need all that as he takes one of the hardest jobs in city government, overseeing Muni buses, streetcars and cable cars, as well as parking and traffic, street design, bike lanes, scooters and the taxi industry. The department’s annual budget tops $1.2 billion, and it employs nearly 6,000 people.

You can hear our full conversation at sfchronicle.com/insider.

But here are some of his aspirations — and they’re big ones. Mind you, aspirations don’t often amount to much at notoriously slow City Hall, which never met a layer of bureaucracy it didn’t like. And he won’t be able to change policy without the buy-in of the transit agency’s board and, often, the Board of Supervisors and mayor. And sometimes even permission from the state.

But still, it’s refreshing to hear grand ideas to fix our clogged, frustrating, dangerous streets. Goodness knows we need them.

Dear Congressional delegation,

I love you on most topics. But there is no capacity on 101 + 380 to handle another bridge's worth of induced highway demand. Let's learn from the failures of our 1950s thinking, and pursue real solutions. I know some people who can help

love, Jeff https://t.co/2htd7qvomr — Jeffrey Tumlin (@jeffreytumlin) November 15, 2019

On Vision Zero: City Hall set a goal in 2014 of ending traffic fatalities by 2024, but halfway through that 10-year span, we’re nowhere near achieving it. Already, 27 people have died in traffic this year, 17 of them pedestrians.

As I reported recently, every 15 hours, somebody severely injured in city traffic is taken to San Francisco General Hospital in an ambulance. Tumlin said that, counting less serious injuries, more than 3,000 people are hurt or killed on the streets annually — and the city mostly just shrugs.

“That’s the equivalent of six 747s full of people every year,” he said. “Imagine if at SFO they crashed a 747 every other month. There would be a response. We’ve become inured to traffic violence. We call traffic violence accidents, as if they were an ‘oops!’”

To him, they’re crashes, collisions or, yes, traffic violence.

Dear motorists, as the days get shorter, please remember the fragility of the body and the power of your beautiful machine. Please don't let the incivility of our roads dampen your own kindness — Jeffrey Tumlin (@jeffreytumlin) November 21, 2019

So what would help? Dramatically slowing traffic. The human body can withstand impact at 13 mph, Tumlin said, but after that, bones start breaking. The faster the car that hits you, the more likely you are to die. If you’re hit by a car traveling 20 mph, there’s a 10% chance you’ll die. At 40 mph, that goes to 80%.

Tumlin would like to see traffic in the city slowed to 13 mph. Most city streets currently have speed limits of 25 to 30 mph, so this would be a major change, but Tumlin said it could be a more pleasant one for drivers if signals are timed so cars don’t have to stop.

He pointed to downtown Portland, Ore., as a model. Many streets are one way, and lights are timed so cars move along at 11 to 12 mph without much congestion, he said. (The speed limit is actually 20 mph, but street design slows the traffic more.) Nobody could argue that driving in downtown San Francisco is a remotely pleasant or efficient experience, so why not try something new?

On cars: Tumlin still owns a car, but he said he’s filed a certificate of non-operation with the Department of Motor Vehicles and intends to get rid of it. He said his generation is the last one to have been convinced by advertising that cars would bring “freedom, autonomy, social status and sex.” (For the record, I have never felt that way about my Toyota with car seats and crushed Goldfish crackers embedded into the upholstery.)

Tumlin said younger people get these feelings from their phones instead. Told you his thinking is out of the box.

Tumlin said his least favorite driver behavior is “arrogance and entitlement,” and he wants to engineer ways to slow cars and make driving patterns safer. He supports banning right turns on red lights in the downtown core and in neighborhood commercial corridors. He is a big believer in automated speed enforcement, which still needs permission from Sacramento to proceed.

He supports removing parking spots in front of bus stops and giving his parking control officers the authority to ticket people who drive in bus or bike lanes. Currently, they can ticket only cars parked in those spaces.

In his consulting gig, he’s been helping the Recreation and Park Department look at how to “eliminate fear of traffic violence” in Golden Gate Park, though he wouldn’t divulge specifics. He said he’s interested in seeing more parts of the city go car-free — like Grant Avenue on weekends or part of Valencia Street every Saturday to host concerts.

And he’d like the streets of the Tenderloin changed from speedy thoroughfares to calmed, pleasant roadways.

“If it serves more people and helps commercial districts thrive, great, let’s do it,” he said.

Really, he’d like to see fewer cars and less free street parking, which he calls “subsidized car storage,” in San Francisco. Full stop.

“The geometry of the city is such that we don’t have room for more cars,” he said. “How do we make the transportation system reliable and convenient and safe and civil so more San Franciscans like me feel like it’s time for me to get rid of my car?”

On Muni: One of Tumlin’s top concerns is the hundreds of vacant positions at the agency. Transit operators — also known as bus drivers — start at a salary of $54,626 and reach $78,026 within four years. That’s not much in exorbitant San Francisco, and many drivers are commuting from the far reaches of the Bay Area or even the Central Valley.

Being a bus operator was once a path to the middle class, and a modest home in SF 13/18 — Jeffrey Tumlin (@jeffreytumlin) November 16, 2019

This is one more city agency that needs to literally spread the wealth. Tumlin will earn about $342,000 annually, and he’s posted several times on Twitter looking for a new spokesperson who will make up to $225,000! Why talking about buses is worth three or four times more than driving them is beyond me.

“I’m asking questions out loud,” he said. “Does Muni need to become a regional transit operator just to be able to get our workforce to work from Patterson (Stanislaus County)? Does Muni need to use its surplus space to build dormitories so our workforce can have a place to crash during the week?”

That’s crash as in sleep, by the way. Tricky word to use when talking about bus drivers.

He also wants to create a Clipper card 2.0 that could be used to pay fares for more transit agencies around the Bay Area and to design maps that include the routes for all area agencies. He wants to find a way to make it easier to get to Caltrain so fewer drivers motor down to the South Bay.

Tumlin said on the podcast that cable car rides should be cheaper for kids, something I’ve advocated in a previous column. Currently, the charge is $7 each way for anybody 5 and older, and that will rise to a nutty $8 on Jan. 1. The rides don’t even come with free transfers to get back. That means it will cost a family of four $64 for a round-trip ride. Tumlin agreed that’s “too much.”

He also pledged that when he has enough drivers, he’ll get the quirky boat tram — the topless streetcar from England that’s strung with colorful lights — on the rails every day that it’s not raining. It ran two days a week over the summer and early fall, but it’s usually kept in storage.

So there’s a lot to keep an eye on when Tumlin takes over. Here’s hoping for a relatively smooth ride.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf