Transbay Blog

There are two notable Muni events happening tomorrow, Saturday, September 20. First is the debut of the Muni Metro East light rail maintenance and storage facility. Located on Illinois Street between 25th Street and Cesar Chavez, the new facility is more convenient to the T-Third terminus at Sunnydale. LRVs can access the complex using two wyes south of the 23rd Street T-Third station. The $204 million facility will store 80 LRVs, thus providing relief to the overburdened Green Division at Balboa Park.

The other piece of news is the start of service on the new 74X line, a.k.a. CultureBus, a special service line that will link museums and other cultural institutions that are dispersed across San Francisco. The line will be introduced this week in order to usher in the opening of the new Academy of Sciences next week, on September 27. Fare — which is valid on the 74X for one full day — is $7 for adults, $5 for youth and seniors, and $3 with a Fast Pass. Service runs between about 8:40 am and 5:50 pm, on 20-minute headways. The line travels between Howard & New Montgomery and Golden Gate Park; along the way, it stops at the cluster of museums in the Yerba Buena District, at Union Square, and at the Asian Art Museum. Outbound buses then express to Golden Gate Park. The bus does not serve the more remotely-located Legion of Honor. Click here to see a list of inbound and outbound stops on the 74X.

Service will be run on special, branded vehicles — yellow, no less, so they will probably be difficult to miss. SFMTA anticipates pretty light ridership: about 20-30 riders per bus.  The success of the new line is premised on the assumption that enough people are visiting multiple museums in a single day, in order to make the expensive fare worthwhile — and perhaps it is also premised on the assumption that riders are not sufficiently familiar with Muni to realize that the cultural institutions along the route are already well-served by much less expensive (although locally-serving) transit. It would be interesting to investigate the extent to which ridership would increase by anchoring this line at a regional rail node. One nice service option might be to coordinate service with the hourly northbound Caltrain arrivals on the weekend, depending on how many riders that connection would attract. Also: while the 74X route waffles within a few blocks of the BART subway, it does not actually stop directly at a station.

If you have an opportunity to ride the CultureBus this weekend, please write back with your experience!

A lot of street closures for the SF Pride 2008 events means a lot of Muni service updates. It’s actually a bit of a mess, because in a few instances, the same line will be rerouted slightly differently at different times of day. Sunday, Muni will add more service to the subway from 8 am to 11 pm and complementary bus service for the J-Church, north of 30th Street. BART will also be running extra service on Sunday for the parade. Since there will be many Civic Center street closures in the area bounded by Van Ness, Turk, Leavenworth, Market, and Hayes, bus lines passing through here are rerouted. General rule of thumb: just wait at the bus stops for other lines that are located on these streets, or walk clear of the area until you reach a relatively unaffected line. Details, after the jump:

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, it’s that time of year again! A time in which a San Franciscan sort of frivolity stretches from the Bay to the Sea — and also a time in which more or less every Muni line goes to hell in a handbasket. The route runs along Howard (from Steuart to 9th), 9th (from Howard to Market), Hayes (from Market to Divisadero), jogs over to Fell (from Divisadero to Golden Gate Park), and follows JFK Drive thereafter to the Great Highway. Nice options that do not require Muni include: (1) enjoying the race — interpret that however you like; (2) walking or biking; and (3) not going anywhere. But just in case you were planning to ride Muni on Sunday and didn’t want to wade through the really long long list of service updates, here they are, after the jump, clarified and condensed. (Also, BART is running extra service two hours early to accommodate people traveling to the race, as is Caltrain.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, after all the squabbles, arguments, and protests attempting to settle whether or not it properly comports with San Francisco values, the Olympic torch run is finally here. Of course, that means there are Muni service updates, affecting the torch route along the Embarcadero. For your convenience, here are today’s highlights:

• Muni Metro service between Embarcadero Station and Caltrain will be suspended, so the N-Judah will terminate at Embarcadero, and the T-Third will operate south of 4th & King. The easiest access between Market Street and Caltrain will be via the 30 and 45 bus lines.
• Cable cars will operate on bus substitution.
• The F line will only operate between 11th Street and its western terminal point at 17th Street. Alternate routes to Fisherman’s Wharf/Aquatic Park area include: 9X, 10, 19, 20, 30, 47, 49.
• There will probably be delays and unannounced route changes on several bus lines operating near Fisherman’s Wharf, including: 9X, 10, 12, 19, 20, 30, 39, 47, 49.

The service updates will apply from roughly noon onwards today. Click here for the SFMTA’s post.

Above image extracted from How Stuff Works.

Preparations for the replacement temporary Transbay Terminal are well underway and proceeding according to schedule, with a start to construction planned for later this year. The terminal is planned to be at least partially open for business starting in the summer of 2009. When the aerial structure hovering over a small portion of the site is demolished, the whole terminal should be operational by late 2009 and will remain in use for about five years, until the new Pelli Transit Center is completed. The temporary terminal site — the entire block bounded by Howard, Main, Folsom, and Beale Streets — is south of the current Transbay Terminal, further removed from the Market Street transit core. Several Muni lines will be rerouted and extended to accommodate this shift in terminal location. Because the existence of the aerial loop necessarily phases terminal construction, reroutes will change slightly to accommodate the construction schedule. The details:

• The 5-Fulton will use the two-way pair of Main and Beale to serve the northern border of the terminal at Howard.
• During the short first phase, the 38/38L-Geary and the 71/71L-Haight/Noriega will serve the northern border of the terminal at Howard, but for most of the life of the temporary terminal, both the 38/38L and 71/71L will loop to the southern border of the site at Folsom, also using the two-pair of Main and Beale.
• Because the 71/71L will be rerouted to the terminal, the 6-Parnassus will terminate at Ferry Plaza.
• The 108-Treasure Island (now extended to the Caltrain Depot afternoons and evenings) and the 76-Marin Headlands will serve the temporary terminal. Several other routes (1-California, 12-Folsom/Pacific, 20-Columbus, 30X-Marina Express, 41-Union) that currently run on portions of Howard and Folsom will continue to do so, accessing the northern border of the terminal site.
• Unlike its current configuration, the route of the 10-Townsend will not directly serve the temporary terminal, with southbound buses using 2nd Street and northbound buses using Folsom and Fremont before aligning onto Sansome.
• The 14/14L-Mission route will not be changed, so it will miss the temporary terminal by one long block.

For visual learners, here is a PDF map of the final phase reroutes.

Full Muni Metro service to be restored on March 24. Regular Muni Metro riders have no doubt already noticed the prominent signs that have been posted in subway stations, but for those who ride the system less frequently: after two long years, the Metro improvement project is finally coming to a close. Full subway service on the K, L, M, and T lines will be restored to the usual 1:00 am time, and all bus substitution bridges will be discontinued. The first day of full service is Monday, March 24.
[Municipal Transportation Agency]

Extensions of Muni lines 44 and 108 start this Saturday. February 23, Muni will start running permanently extended service on the 44-O’Shaughnessy and 108-Treasure Island bus routes. The 44 will be rerouted off of Fairfax and onto Evans, terminating at Bayview Plaza, near the Evans T-Third station. The 108 will be extended to serve the Caltrain depot at 4th and Townsend, facilitating a more direct connection between Treasure Island and the Peninsula. The extension will operate every day, between approximately 2:00 pm to 10:00 pm, with express service between the Transbay Terminal and the Caltrain depot. More details are provided on the SFMTA’s website. But the most exciting piece of news coming out of this story might be that contrary to its usual procedure of including blocks of ambiguous and confusing text, the MTA actually included clear maps depicting the rerouted service.

VTA upgrades light rail platforms. This weekend, VTA has started a project that will retrofit its south line light rail platforms to permit level boarding by eliminating en eight-inch gap between platforms and light rail vehicles. The stations that will be upgraded are: Children’s Discovery Museum, Virginia, Tamien, Curtner, Capitol, Branham, Ohlone / Chynoweth, Oakridge, Almaden, Blossom Hill, Snell, Cottle and Santa Teresa; construction will move from north to south. The retrofits, which will cost close to $23 million of mostly federal money, are expected to be finished by March 2009, so light rail riders can expect to contend with bus bridges during the construction. The first set of service updates are posted here, and periodic updates will probably be at this link throughout the year.
[Santa Clara VTA]

Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA), the agency which operates buses and light rail in the South Bay and the southern reaches of the Peninsula, has traditionally organized itself according to the principle that bus routes should cover a reasonably comprehensive geographic area, so that given enough time, an individual can essentially travel to most locations in the region using VTA routes, or at least get pretty close. However, VTA’s domain is overwhelmingly suburban, and suburban densities are generally too low to support this sort of service. Indeed, based on the fact that many of their routes see quite low ridership — in some cases, just a few hundred riders throughout the whole day — a majority of South Bay denizens do not take advantage of VTA’s geographic coverage. Moreover, ridership has decreased substantially in the past few years. Bus ridership peaked at a little over 150,000 daily boardings in 1999 before the dot-com bust but has since retreated to around 100,000 daily boardings. VTA’s light rail system can also hardly be deemed a success; daily boardings, which peaked at just over 30,000 in 2001 have since retreated to around 26,000. Not impressive, but it is actually an increase over 2004, when there were fewer than 18,000 daily riders.

However, VTA’s problems are deeper than just low ridership. Read the rest of this entry »

Pretty crazy storm last night, wasn’t it? We could definitely use the rain, but there have been a lot of problems. Earlier today, over half a million people were without power in the Bay Area alone, and many more around the state. That number is reducing as PG&E works to restore power, but outages could last through the weekend. The eastbound direction of the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge is still closed, along with many other roads around the Bay Area; that bridge’s westbound direction was just reopened. Of course, there are many transit delays as well, as agencies scramble to set service right again. Updates after the jump:

Read the rest of this entry »