Skip to main content

A Day in History: Market Street Subway Milestone

A Day in History: Market Street Subway Milestone
By Jeremy Menzies

Forty-five years ago on January 31, 1978, San Francisco Muni and city officials along with members of the press took an inaugural ride in the brand new Market Street Subway from Castro Station to Embarcadero.

black and white image of Muni LRV on L Taraval Line waiting at platform inside Embarcadero Station

The inaugural run traveled roughly three miles from Castro Station to Embarcadero Station.

The three-mile-long Market Street Subway forms the backbone of the Muni Metro system. Built alongside the BART tunnel which runs below, the subway provided faster service through downtown for local and regional travelers.

black and white photo of Mayor George Moscone seated at controls of Muni LRV with SFPUC Commissioner Claire Pilcher standing

San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Public Utilities Commissioner Claire Pilcher pose for a photo in the operator’s compartment of one of Muni’s first light rail vehicles.

In development for 50 years and under construction for another ten, the Market Street Subway took longer to implement than any other transit project before or after.

black adnw hite photo looking down to platform at Embarcadero Station to crowd of people next to LRV and speaking podium

A large crowd of people and press came out for the ride and press conference at Embarcadero Station.

At the time of this event, San Francisco’s main transit tunnel was the Twin Peaks Tunnel, which opened in 1918. The Twin Peaks Tunnel shuttled people on the K, L, and M Lines from the Castro to West Portal, decreasing travel time from the southwest side of town significantly. Streetcars exited the tunnel at Castro Street and travel along Market to downtown. This trip along the busiest street in the city frequently negated any travel time savings in the tunnel.

black and white photo of Mayor George Moscone cutting ribbon with scissors

Capping off the celebration was a ribbon cutting led by Mayor Moscone.

With the Market Street Subway linked to the Twin Peaks Tunnel, Muni began a new era of rail service using Light Rail Vehicles. Designed to increase capacity, LRVs could run on the surface then enter the subway and travel unimpeded by street traffic five miles from downtown to West Portal and back. This first train ride and ribbon cutting marked the end of a long wait and the beginning of a new subway system for San Francisco.



Published January 31, 2023 at 04:20AM
https://ift.tt/PAi43oZ
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Women Pioneers at Muni: Adeline Svendsen and Muni’s First Newsletter

Women Pioneers at Muni: Adeline Svendsen and Muni’s First Newsletter By Jeremy Menzies To close out Women’s History Month, here’s a look back at one woman whose work to bring Muni staff together in the late 1940s created a legacy that lives on to this day. Adeline “Addy” Svendsen was founding editor of Muni’s first internal newsletter, “ Trolley Topics .” Adeline Svendsen sits at her desk in the Geneva Carhouse office building in this 1949 shot. Trolley Topics was a new venture when it started in February 1946. As Svendsen wrote in the first issue it was created, “to bring a little fun, a little news, and a lot of good will to all our fellow employees in the Railway.” Just two years prior in 1944, Muni merged with the Market Street Railway Company, expanding the small municipal operation into the largest transit provider in the city with hundreds of employees, vehicles of every shape and size, and dozens of facilities scattered across town. The newsletter was meant to help unite ...
Post a Comment
Read more https//reachsingh.blogspot.com»

Show HN: StreetComplete, an OpenStreetMap Editor for Humans https://ift.tt/2J8IL02

Show HN: StreetComplete, an OpenStreetMap Editor for Humans StreetComplete is an OpenStreetMap[0] editor directed at people who want to contribute and want to do this using their smartphone, without learning how to edit things[1]. It is available as an Android application. It is intended to be used as one walks, with quests appearing as markers on the map. Selecting a marker allows one to answer a simple question. The answer will be added to the OpenStreetMap database, with app handling selecting objects for editing, transforming answer into OSM tags and making edits. OpenStreetMap account is needed to apply edits, but it is possible to start without it, make some edits and login/register later. Note: I am not the main author, but I am one of the active contributors. Github page is at https://ift.tt/2g8lasH and https://ift.tt/3nR9PzS shows what was recently released. [0]OpenStreetMap is a Wikipedia of maps, available on the open licence. This dataset is already used for many interestin...
Post a Comment
Read more https//reachsingh.blogspot.com»

Show HN: Launch VM workloads securely and instantaneously, without VMs https://ift.tt/2QwJ1Kd

Show HN: Launch VM workloads securely and instantaneously, without VMs Hello HN! We've been working on a new hypervisor https://kwarantine.xyz that can run strongly isolated containers. This is still a WIP, but we wanted to give the community an idea about our approach, its benefits, and various use cases it unlocks. Today, VMs are used to host containers, and make up for the lack of strong security as well as kernel isolation in containers. This work adds this missing security piece in containers. We plan on launching a free private beta soon. Meanwhile, we'd deeply appreciate any feedback, and happy to answer any questions here or on our slack channel. Thanks! April 29, 2021 at 07:50AM
Post a Comment
Read more https//reachsingh.blogspot.com»