Alternatives for a Geary Street subway in San Francisco with BART, MUNI Metro, or automated Skytrain technology. (Tomo Tawa Linja)

Wordless 1900-era dream drama. MrWhippler combines Klovn’s ambient song “McKlaren” with a silent movie “In the Land of Nod”. The dream starts at 1:15, a main street inhabited with stop-motion toy dolls and animals on foot and in vehicles. The street is shared by pedestrians, wheelbarrows, horse carriages, tricycles, motorcars, and a double-decker buses. The characters get into street fights and mayhem and vehicle crashes.

This is an open thread.

30 Replies to “Sunday Movies: Geary Subway & Misbehaving Toys”

  1. MUNI definitely invests crazy service hours on Route 38. I’ve had multiple occasions seeing 3-4 38 or 38R arriving at the same time. They are the eastbound trips from Lands End so I am sure the bunching was not due to traffic but just super high frequency. Another transit route I’ve seen such frequent service is LA Metro 720 before 2020.

    I rode 38 the entire way from Lands End to Transit Center last year. One thing that surprises me is that Geary Blvd inside Richmond District doesn’t really have any modern high rise. It doesn’t even have a lot of corporate apartments that have been popping up everywhere in the past decade, but apparently its neighborhood of predominantly 2-4 story structure manage to house a lot of people and business which generates tons of transit ridership for Route 38/38R. I am always amazed how west part of city of San Francisco is preserved so well through the decades of suburbanization.

    1. Yes that’s something that others around the country don’t understand about the Geary corridor. It has lots of riders — but SF zoning maps don’t promote potentially significant densification beyond what is already there.

      Seattle has been much more aggressive about adding density in its neighborhoods.

      And residents — especially those that own classic SF zero lot line homes plentiful on the corridor’s side streets — don’t want the higher density.

      1. It is also interesting that landlords of these neighborhoods barely sold their lots to be developed to parking lot through those times.
        I think that’s part of why this mid/low density neighborhood still generate 30k ridership a day for Geary corridor.

      2. Mid to low population density on Geary?! Even Outer Richmond is uniformly over 20,000 per square mile, and some tracts top 30,000 per square mile. In what universe is that mid to low density? That’s close to U District levels of density.

        Sure, it’s San Francisco so there’s almost certainly market demand for even more density, but it’s exactly things like Outer Richmond having 25,000 people per square mile that drives huge ridership on the 38/38R. And yes, lack of parking plays a role in preserving bus ridership. But calling any part of San Francisco “low to medium density” is only true if your measuring stick is Manhattan.

      3. I can have the higher density with buildings under 40-50 feet because SF developed with a high percentage of lot coverage. Part of that is also that SF allowed more than one housing unit per lot.

        It’s a good example of how height alone isn’t the sole way to create density. It can also be done with “missing middle” housing design.

      4. Yeah Geary seems to be ~25-35k/mi2. For reference, that’s roughly as dense as First Hill in 2020 (~30-35k/mi2). Nothing crazy, but certainly fairly dense by US standards.

        https://nathenry.com/writing/2022-11-21-seattle-density.html

        I’ve seen quite a lot of growth in First Hill over the last few years, and that seems to be reflected in the data: from 2020 to 2025, First Hill’s population has grown about 25% according to OFM data, putting it closer to 35-45k/mi2 today.

        https://ofm.wa.gov/data-research/population-demographics/estimates/small-area/

      5. jd,

        I think what makes San Francisco unusual by US standards isn’t the high density in specific places, its the uniformly high density. The fact that you compare Outer Richmond (5 miles from downtown) to First Hill (<1 mile from downtown) sort of proves that point. The north side of Chicago is the only other non East Coast city in the US that has something similar. Long stretches of high density neighborhoods make for great bus lines, which is why Muni is able to run so many great bus lines.

      6. blumdrew

        No need to freak out. It was my mistake to call that low/mid density. What I really meant to say was those low/mid rise neighborhoods.

        They look like single family neighborhood with just big house on the map. They don’t have high rise, but they sure have tight yard and tons of single-family turned multi-family buildings.
        I read this thing which mentioned that some of the single family houses were designed with extra plumbing capacity so that they can be easily converted into multi-family buildings. Nice time when parking was not really a concern.

        https://www.outsidelands.org/nelson-richmond.php

      1. I looked at the proposed height limits along the Geary corridor. The proposal appears to say that it’s only 50 feet along Geary and 40 feet on the side streets across the Richmond west of Masonic. That’s hardly a change if I’m reading that right.

    3. How does a Geary subway help Muni much at all? Geary is not like Wiltshire; there are really no strong clusters of density. Even the business centers at Fillmore, Masonic and Twenty-Fifth are barely “urban villages”.

      A subway would mostly be a big bonus for property owners at the station locations.

      2. Wilshire corridor may have more taller buildings, but its population density might be lower than Geary corridor given a lot of them are high rise are spacious condos occupied by fewer people. Secondly, density sometimes sometimes doesn’t translate to transit ridership. Those population close to Wilshire corridor probably drive a lot more than those who lives near Geary because people’s attitude to transit in LA is definitely different from those whom lives in SF.

        Setting aside the density along the either corridor, Geary corridor attracts 50k+ boarding in 2019. Isn’t that enough to justify a MUNI Metro line?
        Wilshire corridor in LA is nowhere near that despite having higher density along corridor. LA Metro’s document shows that Vermont transit corridor that serves 38000+ boarding daily is the busiest in the system, so I’d assume 20/720+BigBlueBus 2’s Wilshire corridor is less than that.

      3. Geary’s westmost non-residential destinations are pretty modest with it being a long but narrow (1 parcel deep on either side) neighborhood commercial street in the Richmond (west of Masonic). The central portion has three large medical centers — Kaiser, Mt Zion and CPMC — which are citywide draws. And the dense eastern portion serves the gamut of very short downtown trips.

        The point being that the route functions like a streetcar, with many trips under 2 miles. Seats can turn over three times on one bus run .

        For commuters, Geary also has the AX and BX express buses at peak times. They run on Pine and Bush and get to and from Downtown pretty fast.

        So if it was to become rail, something like a streetcar concept would probably be the way to go. However, those Richmond merchants look at the street like it’s their shopping street even with angled parking on many blocks. They fight to not change that — even fight bus-only lanes . As with many West Coast cities, a lack of consensus results in doing nothing major. Plus SF has seen the Eastern neighborhoods south of Downtown as the place to add residential density and incentivize that with investing in rail transit like the T Line.

        Visionaries will point to ideas like taking the T Line further to Fisherman’s Whart before turning west through the Fort Mason area the south on through the full Westside of the city (with a station on Geary). But like a Metro 8 subway floated here, there’s just not the funds to do that.

        There is a vast library of Geary studies and plans that must date back to the loss of its original streetcar many decades ago. It’s not like it’s been ignored. It’s just been hard for strong support to do a specific major thing doesn’t evolve.

        https://www.sfcta.org/search?k=Geary&page=0

      4. HZ, you made my point. Wilshire is a string of pearls type of development, not a long strip of San Francisco flats. Where do you put the stations west of Masonic? Every mile? At major crossing bus lines? Wherever you do, the owners of nearby properties will get a windfall of implicit value, but will be even more unwilling to sell to a developer who might triple the density in the neighborhood, because they’d now have a fast, reliable and convenient ride to work in the financial district or SoMa.

      5. “Wilshire corridor in LA is nowhere near that despite having higher density along corridor.”

        Wilshire is very different than Geary is. The regional draws like UCLA/ Westwood, Century City and mid-Wilshire are quite major and people travel many miles to reach them . Those draws are however mostly non-residential and are much wider than Geary’s narrow band of neighborhood businesses. The result is a lower residential density on a map but a higher trip end destiny when trips are over 3-5 miles.. The Wilshire corridor is about three times longer than Geary is too.

      6. Tom

        I see your point. I’d say it’s not like SF has the money to build a subway all the way to Lands End, at least not in one phase. Maybe West of Masonic the line should go above ground with Van Ness style of transit right of way and making similar stops as 38R today. It will be just like MUNI N/L Line in Sunset district. Low-key street-running MUNI Metro in Sunset District didn’t seem to gentrify anything, right?

      7. HZ, that would be the right solution. East of Masonic things are “clumpier”; there ARE some larger destinations there. The “local” 38 would still run as an “overlay”, at least as far as 25th Avenue, with the LR replacing the Rapid.

        Certainly the N hasn’t had much effect west of USF. But I would note that Taraval is sprouting some new buildings just a bit west of 19th Avenue, where the trip to the tunnel isn’t too irritating.

      9. USF is only several blocks north of UCSF Medical Center’s Parnassus campus (on the N- Judah line) anyway. So the general reference still kind of works.

  2. Geary they’ve recently added right side bus lanes for the route 38 and 38R

    It didn’t work that well a couple years ago (2022/2023) but I visited SF again this year and it seems to work a lot better now. Mostly used it to get between to japantown and downtown. Not sure if they’ve extended the right lanes more or gotten stricter in enforcing it.

    It’s still quite unfortunate that the Geary center running brt got watered down but it’s good to see they’ve built a decent right side brt so far

    Regarding a subway honestly they should have extended the T line towards Geary rather than up to Chinatown. It would have made a very convenient crosstown subway and an obvious way to extend the T line further west.

    I guess the other alternative they could built would be the Bart extension but that might literally be like 50 years away.

    1. “I guess the other alternative they could built would be the Bart extension but that might literally be like 50 years away.”

      That was in original BART plans. However the wye under central SF would be very difficult to create.

    2. “Regarding a subway honestly they should have extended the T line towards Geary rather than up to Chinatown.”

      As crowded as 38-Geary buses are and as slow as they are, the 30-Stockton was historically much worse.

      Sadly, the Central Subway segment of the T Line is so deep that its ridership is embarrassingly low. Riders don’t want to endure the trek to the platform — especially the hike between this subway at BART and Muni Metro several hundred feet and several escalators away. This is similar to what ST has been planning under Downtown Seattle.

      1. This extension makes sense when they have another phase of extension to Fisherman’s Wharf in mind.
        Currently, it is barely faster than walking unless your destination is right by the station.

    3. I had different experience on 38’s bus lane. I think the enforcement is still an issue especially east of Van Ness.
      During my visits last summer and early this year, traffic was probably fine so it barely caught my attention.
      I was in SF again on the weekend of mid-December. There were some Christmas event at Union Square and 38 driver had to horn his way through Tenderloin.
      A lot of cars were clueless they were on bus lane and drivers have no idea why the bus behind keeping horning at them probably because they barely visit SF downtown these days.

      1. Yeah the Tenderloin (east of Van Ness) a congested mess. At least the one-way Geary and O’Farrell Streets are all two phase signals with short cycles. If the lanes can be kept clear the slowness is only for a short distance — but that’s certainly a challenge.

  3. Today in Eastlake, I spotted the what I believe are old rail ties from the historic streetcar dug up as part of J line construction. Pretty cool.

    1. I saw a big pile of those on Eastlake Ave over the summer (or early fall, I don’t quite recall) as well. They paved right over the ties, I guess. The section on Eastlake Ave and over the University Bridge is the only part of the route that follows the Seattle Electric Company streetcar alignment, I think. Pretty cool indeed.

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