San Francisco’s transportation board has named a new chief: a high-profile outsider who has pledged to fix the subway, fill the bus driver shortages and bring order to an agency now famous for chaos.

Jeffrey Tumlin still has to be confirmed by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s board of directors before he starts on Dec. 16, but the selection was announced on Wednesday. He would be the first LGBT leader to hold what some have called the toughest — and most thankless — job in city government.

“We are in the process of hiring a star,” said SFMTA board chair Malcolm Heinicke. He noted the agency had conducted an international search to find Tumlin, who lives with his husband in Noe Valley, a short train ride from City Hall.

Tumlin began his career managing the parking program at Stanford University, and went on to found Oakland’s Department of Transportation. He’s known in policy circles for taking bold ideas and making them achievable.

He’s stepping into an agency that for months cycled from one disaster to another, drawing increased scrutiny and obvious frustration from Mayor London Breed. Shortly after taking office she began cracking down on former transportation director Ed Reiskin, amid a summer bus meltdown caused by construction work on a major tunnel, but exacerbated by Muni’s chronic shortage of drivers.

Over the past year, change has been the only constant at SFMTA. A new director of transit took over after the previous director resigned under allegations of sexual harassment. The agency grappled with safety issues in its new fleet of train cars as it tackled lingering problems that made a big difference for some residents — like switchbacks and delays on the T line to Bayview. So far, 25 people have died this year in car crashes on city streets, a surge of road mayhem that prompted the Board of Supervisors to declare a state of emergency.

In Tumlin’s view, no problem in San Francisco is insurmountable. Where others see crises, he sees an opening.

“There is an unusual convergence happening” in the city, he said in a recent interview.

“We have a mayor who is tenacious and clear about her values,” he continued. “We have an SFMTA board that is smart ... and ready to bring San Francisco’s transportation system into alignment with San Francisco’s values. And we have the greatest collection of talent among any city department of transportation.”

Tumlin grew up in Orange County. Technically speaking, his first transportation job was operating the Submarine Voyage ride at Disneyland in high school. He moved to San Francisco in 1991, and routinely hid the Stanford credentials from his resume to apply for secretarial jobs during an economic recession.

A former boss recommended him for the Stanford parking management position.

“I did not want to commute to Stanford. I was not interested in parking,” he recalled. “But I was six weeks away from homelessness, so I said yes.”

Over the next few years, he found that transportation influences everything: land-use decisions, housing, where jobs are located, economic opportunity — even health outcomes. Working in Oakland, he said he learned that children who live in neighborhoods surrounded by freeways have a lower than average life expectancy because of all the pollution from cars.

In San Francisco, with an average daily Muni ridership of 700,000 and many residents who rely on streets and roads, transportation is both an obsession and a source of political divisions.

“It’s a very hard job,” state Sen. Scott Wiener said of the director position. “San Francisco is very crowded and there are a lot of conflicts that SFMTA has to manage. Our bus and train system is complicated. Our bike network is complicated.”

Tumlin will leave his job as a principal at the consulting firm Nelson\Nygaard, which develops transportation plans for cities, college campuses and major developments. He’ll inherit Reiskin’s old contract at roughly the same salary: Reiskin made $342,483 a year.

One of his first tasks when he takes the job in December — pending the board’s approval of his employee agreement at its next meeting — will be to curb the number of deaths and injuries caused by traffic crashes.

He has a plan: time the traffic signals to encourage speeds that are slower than the current average of 30 mph. And continue the department’s efforts to redesign intersections, using mechanisms like a left-turn treatment that constrains vehicles to a 90-degree angle, forcing them to go slower and check for pedestrians.

These are small ways to engineer against tragedy, but they actually work, city officials say.

He’ll also have more daunting tasks, like fixing the subway and hiring more bus and train operators. As the cost of housing in San Francisco far outpaces driver salaries, SFMTA has scrambled to fill what used to be middle-class jobs.

There will always be critics blasting away from all sides: residents who don’t want parking stripped away to make way for faster buses, supervisors who want more say in how the agency runs, a labor union known for deliberately slowing service during contract negotiations.

Such skirmishes are familiar to Tumlin. He angered neighborhood activists in Santa Monica, where he worked as a consultant in 2013, pushing a land use plan that increased transit-oriented development but required fewer parking spaces.

San Francisco will likely pose different challenges. It’s “one of the most dynamic cities in the nation,” with a sprawling transportation agency that combines transit and street management — a compelling environment for the right leader, said David Bragdon, head of the New York-based policy foundation, TransitCenter. Yet the city, he said, is also known for a “very litigious ‘citizen involvement’ culture where a handful of people can hold up progress on initiatives like bus lanes and bike lanes, and an endless series of evening meetings of people yelling.”

Like Breed, Tumlin is frank about his priorities. He aims to move people, rather than vehicles. That means a bus with 80 riders takes priority over a car with a single occupant.

“Many of us see cars and buses as equivalent,” he said. Tumlin seeks to change that. “When you view a car with one person the same as a bus with 80 people, you’re saying those riders are valued at 1/80th the worth of somebody driving alone in a car.”

Breed had a tense relationship with Reiskin. She sent a series of scalding letters over the past year, berating the former director in public for equipment issues, bus delays, and allegations that managers were mistreating female employees. Last fall, the mayor appointed an ombudsman to handle internal complaints and bring temporary stability to the agency.

When Reiskin announced his resignation in April — days after a broken overhead wire choked the subway for 10 hours — Breed announced a national search for his replacement.

She wanted a visionary. She said Tumlin is that person.

In Oakland, Tumlin “laid the foundation for the agency’s future success, with a lens on environmental benefits and equality,” Breed told reporters Wednesday. “I believe Jeffrey will do the same at SFMTA.”

Evidently, the admiration is mutual.

“The mayor likes to get stuff done — she does not like dithering,” Tumlin said. “I like to get stuff done. I don’t like to dither. I think the mayor and I will get along very well.”

Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan