Streetsblog San Francisco

I biked the whole route today. There were a ton of people out, and it looked like it got people thinking about the real value of the street, without cars.

I had a great time! I rode all the way into the wharf and saw the chapel there which I had never seen before. Its behind the parking lot which I never venture past. I also noticed part of the bay from the wharf that I’ve never really seen either. Again b/c its behind the surface parking lot. Jan Gehl was right, Jefferson is really cut off from the water.

There were all kinds of folks out and booths with dancers and hola hoops.

What a wonderful day.

My favorite part was buying lunch from the stand at Alioto’s. As we handed over our money, we said, “these are SF Bike Community dollars.”

The man just smiled, and confessed how much better it was at Fisherman’s Wharf without all the cars spewing carbon monoxide all over his fresh crab. Everyone had a big smile on their faces, especially the businesses.

He also said how weird and nice it was to have actual San Franciscans at Fisherman’s Wharf, because it is usually just tourists.

Just goes to show, people fear change until they experience it. Then they start to wonder why they put up with cars ruining our public spaces for so long.

Once people experience car-free spaces and Ciclovia/Sunday Streets, they are hooked for life.

Thanks for documenting the change Streetsblog.

Cutting the F-line in half, as jdub suggests, serves exactly what purpose? Just killing the most successful traditional streetcar line in America, that’s all. The whole purpose of the F-line was to tie the northern Embarcadero and Wharf to the Market Street spine. It has worked incredibly well. There’s plenty of track capacity on The Embarcadero for both an E and F line, and more cars are being renovated to provide the vehicles for it. We tried buses instead of the F-line. It was called the 8-line. The F-line carries almost double what the 8-line did on the same route segment. Why trade success for something less?

Yes, it would kill ridership on the F-Line and would be a disservice to thousands more riders and the businesses along the F-Line than you would ever be able to make up for in the car owners you’d convince to park several miles and a ~30 minute streetcar ride away from Fisherman’s Wharf.

While the turn from Market to Embarcadero is not direct, it’s not a point where ridership turns over and you would force thousands upon thousands of tourists to transfer to Muni Metro were you to force the tourists (forget the locals for a moment) in order to get back and forth between the Ferry Building and Union Square. If you have ever been on the Embarcadero Station platform before a ball game, imagine that level of crowding and the confusion of so many people who are not familiar with the system, but instead of trying to direct them on how to get to a single destination served by only 2 lines, they’d be trying to get to a number of destinations along 5 lines.

And now, you’re placing an additional demand on Muni Metro at it’s Embarcadero, which is already over capacity and the bottleneck that constrains the entire system. And because not all passengers are going as far as Castro, some F-Line cars turn back short at Van Ness, but that’s not even an option for Muni Metro and when the T-Third Street line opened they did turn back trains at Castro, creating another bottleneck that acted like a multiplier to the delays at Embarcadero which means any extra cars (which we don’t have) you would add to Muni Metro would have to run all the way to the end of whatever line you’d add them to.

Work is underway to restore additional streetcars, at a fraction of what new LRVs cost, in order to start both a new E-Line and future F-Line growth.

On that post you link to, I made a couple comments explaining how low-floor LRV service could be added on Market Street along with the F-Line. Before they were put underground, the Muni Metro lines used to share a single pair of tracks on the surface. Adding a second line, especially one that can board faster (assuming there are 3 doors along with being low floor) still won’t come even close to the number of cars that used to run on Market.

The E-Line as a Ballpark Shuttle is going to be a problem because of capacity, boarding time, labor, and again that forced transfer at Market Street. During a game, Muni has one-car T-Third Street trains and two-car N-Judah and some shuttle trains. All of the board on the island platform while a historic streetcar or any new low-floor car would have to board on the side platforms and is going to create a lot of confusion by people not sure which platform to board at.

That becomes a safety concern if people start running between platforms to get the next train. Then there’s the customer experience problem of having to figure out where to stand, possibly getting on the wrong train and ending up in the wrong place and there is the cost. Having two platforms would require more employees to monitor before and after games and a two-car light-rail train only requires one operator where many of the highest capacity of the historic streetcars require two operators to carry fewer people.