10 things to know about San Francisco transit

San Francisco does not have a metro. It has four transit systems layered on top of each other inside seven miles of city: Muni Metro light rail, three surviving cable car lines, a heritage streetcar fleet older than most of the people riding it, and BART running underneath all of it. The daily puzzle at dailymetro.live/sf treats them as one network, which is roughly how locals treat them too.

Here are ten things about that network that are true, checkable, and mostly not on the postcards. A few of them explain why your commute is the way it is.

1. Muni was the first city-owned transit system in a big American city

On 28 December 1912, the Municipal Railway opened its first line on Geary Street, and Mayor James Rolph drove the inaugural car himself. Other American towns had run their own streetcars before, but San Francisco was the first major city to do it, and it did it out of spite: the privately owned United Railroads was a byword for graft, so voters passed a bond and built a competitor.

That founding grudge still shows. Muni ran alongside a private streetcar company on Market Street for decades, with two sets of tracks in the same roadway, before absorbing it in 1944.

2. Four downtown stations are stacked, and you cannot walk between the decks

The Market Street subway was dug once and used twice. Muni Metro trains run on the upper level, BART trains on the lower, and Embarcadero, Montgomery Street, Powell Street and Civic Center are all shared. What surprises visitors is that the two platform levels have no direct connection: to change between a Muni train and a BART train you go up to the concourse and back down again.

BART opened its level in November 1973, Muni took another seven years to move in, on 18 February 1980. All four appear in the game with both the BART tag and the five Market Street Muni lines.

3. Twenty-three cable car lines once existed. Three are left.

Between 1873 and 1890 the city built 23 cable railways. What survives is California (1878, the oldest cable car line still running anywhere), Powell-Mason (1888) and Powell-Hyde, which is not an original line at all: it was stitched together in 1957 out of pieces of two older routes.

The cars have no engine. Each cable runs at a constant 9.5 mph under the street, and the gripman clamps onto it or lets go. That fixed speed is why a cable car never overtakes anything and never varies its pace uphill.

4. The Twin Peaks Tunnel was the longest streetcar tunnel in the world

It opened on 3 February 1918 and runs 2.27 miles under Twin Peaks, and at the time nothing longer had been bored for street railway traffic anywhere. The point was not speed, it was real estate: the tunnel turned sand dunes into the Sunset and the West Portal neighbourhoods within one generation.

Today it carries the K, L and M between West Portal and Castro Street. The name West Portal is not poetic. It is a description of the hole in the hill.

5. Forest Hill is the oldest subway station in the American West

Opened with the tunnel in 1918, about 70 feet below the surface, Forest Hill was the first underground rail station built west of Chicago, and San Francisco Heritage still calls it the first subway station in the West. It was originally named Laguna Honda, and the old name is still carved into the headhouse above the escalators.

The interior has aged into a film set: scenes from Dirty Harry (1971) and Milk (2008) were both shot inside it.

6. BART runs on a gauge nobody else in America uses

BART's track is 5 ft 6 in wide instead of the 4 ft 8.5 in standard, which is why no other railway's equipment can run on it. According to BART's own history of the decision, the engineers wanted lateral stability for very light aluminium cars crossing windy elevated curves, and they got there by putting a scale model in a wind tunnel and running well over a thousand computed cases against it.

The whole system was designed in the early 1960s with an aerospace mindset, down to the aluminium bodyshells. It is the reason BART feels less like a subway and more like a commuter aircraft that lost its wings.

7. The Transbay Tube was built on land and sunk into the bay

The 3.6 mile tube was fabricated in 57 sections, floated out, lowered onto the bay floor and bolted together. Its deepest point is 135 feet below sea level. It opened on 16 September 1974, and after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake it got a seismic retrofit costing on the order of 330 million dollars.

One consequence is visible in the game's data: Embarcadero opened in 1976, three years after the other Market Street BART stations, because its shell sat finished and unfurnished while the money was found.

8. The F line is a working museum, and the cars are from everywhere

The F Market and Wharves opened on 1 September 1995 with a parade of PCC streetcars painted in the liveries of North American cities that once ran them, and the fleet has only got stranger since: around 27 PCCs built between 1946 and 1948, eleven Peter Witt cars bought from Milan, and individual trams from Blackpool, Hamburg, Osaka, Melbourne, Moscow, Porto and Brussels.

It exists because of an accident. When the cable cars shut for reconstruction in 1982, Muni ran historic streetcars as a stopgap, people loved it, and the stopgap became a permanent line. The E Embarcadero followed in 2015 on the same principle.

9. The Central Subway cost 1.578 billion dollars for 1.7 miles

The T Third Street extension under Fourth and Stockton opened for weekend shuttle service on 19 November 2022 and went into full service on 7 January 2023, at a final budget of 1.578 billion dollars for three new underground stations. Chinatown-Rose Pak reaches about 100 feet down and required the deepest building excavation ever dug in San Francisco.

It also carries ten permanent artworks, including a 100 foot mural by Tomie Arai at Chinatown-Rose Pak. Early ridership was thin: SFMTA counted around 1,168 daily boardings at that station in February 2023.

10. Drivers keep steering their cars into the Sunset Tunnel

The Sunset Tunnel opened on 21 October 1928, runs 4,232 feet from Duboce and Noe to Carl and Cole, and carries only the N Judah. It has no road lane, no pavement and no reason for a car to be in it. Motorists drive into it anyway, and Wikipedia's account of the tunnel records four separate incidents in February 2017 alone.

If you have ever watched an N Judah sit motionless at Duboce Park for twenty minutes, this is one of the plausible explanations.

What the game actually covers

DailyMetro's San Francisco set is 108 stops across thirteen lines, which is why the answers range from a downtown mega-station to a cable car corner in Nob Hill. The full list lives on the lines and stations page.

If you want the rules rather than the trivia, the BART and Muni guessing game guide explains how the clues work, and the roundup of San Francisco transit games covers the rest of the genre.