Muni Metro
Muni Metro is a light rail system serving San Francisco, California, United States. Operated by the San Francisco Municipal Railway, a part of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, Muni's light rail lines saw an average of boardings per day as of and a total of boardings in, making it the fifth-busiest light rail system in the United States.
Five services—J Church, K Ingleside, L Taraval, M Ocean View, and N Judah—run on separate surface alignments and merge into a single east–west tunnel, the Market Street subway. The T Third Street uses a north–south tunnel downtown, the Central Subway. The supplementary S Shuttle service operates within the Market Street subway and Twin Peaks Tunnel. Muni Metro operates a fleet of 249 Siemens S200 LRVs. The system has 117 stations, of which 63 are accessible.
Muni Metro is one of the surviving first-generation streetcar systems in North America. The San Francisco Municipal Railway was created in 1909 and opened its first streetcar lines in 1912. Five of the current lines were added in the following decades: the J in 1917, the K in 1918, the L in 1919, the M in 1925, and the N in 1928. The other Municipal Railway streetcar lines, and those of the privately owned Market Street Railway, were converted to buses in the 1920s to 1950s, but these five lines were retained as streetcars because of their private rights of way. The system was converted to light rail, with larger US Standard Light Rail Vehicles, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This included the opening of the Market Street subway as well as an extension of three lines to Balboa Park station. An extension along The Embarcadero to the Caltrain terminal at 4th and King Street opened in 1998. The T Third Street line opened in 2007, serving the southeastern portion of the city. The Central Subway, with three new subway stations and one new surface station, opened on November 19, 2022.
History
Beginnings
The first street railroad in San Francisco was the San Francisco Market Street Railroad Company, which was incorporated in 1857 and began operating in 1860, with track along Market Street from California to Mission Dolores. Muni Metro descended from the municipally owned traditional streetcar system started on December 28, 1912, when the San Francisco Municipal Railway was established. The first streetcar line, the A Geary, ran from Kearny and Market Streets in the Financial District to Fulton Street and 10th Avenue in the Richmond District. The system slowly expanded, opening the Twin Peaks Tunnel in 1917, allowing streetcars to run to the southwestern quadrant of the city. By 1921, the city was operating of electric trolley lines and of cable car lines. The last line to start service before 2007 was the N Judah, which started service after the Sunset Tunnel opened in 1928.In the 1940s and 1950s, as in many North American cities, public transit in San Francisco was consolidated under the aegis of a single municipal corporation, which then began phasing out much of the streetcar network in favor of buses. However, five heavily used streetcar lines traveled for at least part of their routes through tunnels or otherwise reserved right-of-way, and thus could not be converted to bus lines. As a result, these lines, running PCC streetcars, continued in operation.
Market Street subway
Original plans for the BART system drawn up in the 1950s envisioned a double-decked subway tunnel under Market Street in downtown San Francisco; the lower deck would be dedicated to express trains, while the upper would be served by local trains whose routes would spread south and west through the city. However, by 1961 these plans were altered; only a single BART route would travel through the city on the lower deck, while the upper deck would be served by the existing Muni streetcar routes. The new tunnel would be connected to the existing Twin Peaks Tunnel. The new underground stations would feature high platforms, and the older stations would be retrofitted with the same, which meant that the PCC cars could not be used in them. Hence, a fleet of new light rail vehicles was ordered from Boeing-Vertol, but were not delivered until 1979–80, even though the tunnel was completed in 1978. The K and M lines were extended to Balboa Park during this time, providing further connections to BART.File:PCC 1025 and Boeing LRV 1220 at West Portal, November 1980.jpg|thumb|left|K Ingleside USSLRV passes an PCC car at West Portal, November 1980.
On February 18, 1980, the Muni Metro was officially inaugurated, with weekday N line service in the subway. The Metro service was implemented in phases, and the subway was served only on weekdays until 1982. The K Ingleside line began using the entire Metro subway on weekdays on June 11, 1980, the L Taraval and M Ocean View lines on December 17, 1980, and lastly the J Church line on June 17, 1981. Meanwhile, weekend service on all five lines continued to use PCC cars operating on the surface of Market Street through to the Transbay Terminal, and the Muni Metro was closed on weekends. At the end of the service day September 19, 1982, streetcar operations on the surface of Market Street were discontinued entirely, the remaining PCC cars taken out of service, and weekend service on the five light rail lines was temporarily converted to buses. Finally, on November 20, 1982, the Muni Metro subway began operating seven days a week.
At the time, there were no firm plans to revive any service on the surface of Market Street or return PCC cars to regular running. However, tracks were rehabilitated for the 1983 Historic Trolley Festival, and the inauguration of the F line, served by heritage streetcars, followed in 1995.
By the late 1980s, Muni scheduled 20 trains per hour through the Market Street subway at peak periods, with all trains using the crossover west of Embarcadero station to reverse direction. To allow for high frequencies on the surface branches, eastbound trains were combined at West Portal and Duboce Portal, and westbound trains split at those locations. Two-car N Judah trains and one-car J Church trains combined at the Duboce Portal, while two-car L Taraval trains alternately combined with two-car M Ocean View and K Ingleside trains at West Portal to form four-car trains. However, this provided suboptimal service; many inbound trains did not arrive at the portals in time to combine into longer trains.
Muni meltdown
In the mid to late 1990s, San Francisco grew more prosperous and its population expanded with the advent of the dot-com boom, and the Metro system began to feel the strain of increased commuter demand. Muni criticism had been something of a feature of life in San Francisco, and not without reason. The Boeing trains were sub-par and grew crowded quickly, and the difficulty in running a hybrid streetcar and light rail system—with five lines merging into one—led to scheduling problems on the main trunk lines with long waits between arrivals and commuter-packed trains sometimes sitting motionless underground for extended periods of time.Muni did take steps to address these problems. Newer, larger Breda cars were ordered, an extension of the system towards South Beach—where many of the new dot-coms were headquartered—was built, and the underground section was switched to Automatic Train Operation. The Breda cars, however, came in noisy, overweight, oversized, under-braked, and over-budget. In fact, the new trains were so heavy that some homeowners, claiming that the exceptional weight of the Breda cars damaged their foundations, sued the city of San Francisco. The Breda cars are longer and wider than the previous Boeing cars, necessitating the modification of subway stations and maintenance yards, as well as the rear view mirrors on the trains themselves. Furthermore, the Breda cars do not run in three-car trains, like the Boeing cars used to, as doing so had, in some instances, physically damaged the overhead power wires. The Breda trains were so noisy that San Francisco budgeted over $15million to quiet them down, while estimates range up to $1million per car to remedy the excessive noise. Throughout their service lives the Breda cars remained noisier than the PCC and Boeing cars. In 1998, federal inspectors mandated a lower speed limit of, down from, because the brakes were problematic.
The ATC system was plagued by numerous glitches when first implemented, initially causing significantly more harm than good. Common occurrences included sending trains down the wrong tracks, and, more often, inappropriately applying emergency braking. Eventually the result was a spectacular service crisis, widely referred to as the "Muni meltdown", in the summer of 1998. During this period, two reporters for the San Francisco Chronicle—one riding in the Muni Metro subway and one on foot on the surface—held a race through downtown, with the walking reporter emerging the winner.
After initial problems with the ATC were fixed, substantial upgrades to the entire Muni transit systems have gone a long way towards resolving persistent crowding and scheduling issues. Nonetheless, Muni remains one of the slowest urban transport systems in the United States.
Recent expansions
In 1980, the M Ocean View was extended from Broad Street and Plymouth Avenue to its current terminus at Balboa Park. In 1991, the J Church was extended from Church and 30th Streets to its current terminus at Balboa Park. In 1998, the N Judah was extended from Embarcadero Station to the planned site of the new Pacific Bell Park and Caltrain Depot, The extension was briefly served between January and August of that year by the temporary E Embarcadero light rail shuttle.In 2007, the T Third Street, running south from Caltrain Depot along Third Street to the southern edge of the city, opened as part of the Third Street Light Rail Project. Limited weekend T line service began on January 13, 2007, while full service began on April 7, 2007. The line initially ran from the southern terminus at Bayshore Boulevard and Sunnydale Street to Castro Street Station in the north. The line ran into initial problems with breakdowns, bottlenecks, and power failures, creating massive delays. Service changes to address complaints with the introduction of the T Third Street were implemented on June 30, 2007, when the K and T trains were interlined, or effectively merged into one single line with route designations changing at the entrances into the subway.
The Central Subway runs between Chinatown station in Chinatown and a portal in South of Market, with intermediate stops at Union Square/Market Street station in Union Square and Yerba Buena/Moscone station in SoMa. A surface portion runs through SoMa to connect to the existing T Third Street line at 4th and King station. Muni estimates that the Central Subway section of the T Third Street line will carry roughly 35,100 riders per day by 2030. Originally set to open in late 2018, the subway opened with weekend-only shuttle service on November 19, 2022. Full service as part of the T Third Street line began on January 7, 2023. Additional shuttle trains signed "S Chase Center" will operate between and for events at Chase Center.