The 10 weirdest stations in San Francisco

Most San Francisco transit stops are ordinary corners: a pole, a shelter, a cable car groove in the asphalt. Ten of them are not. Some are machines you can watch operate. Some are buried deeper than any building foundation in the city. One still has its old name carved in stone above the escalators, decades after everyone stopped using it.

These are ten stops in dailymetro.live/sf worth a second look, in no particular order, each one a real answer in the daily game.

1. Forest Hill: a headhouse with someone else's name carved into it

Forest Hill opened with the Twin Peaks Tunnel on 3 February 1918, about 70 feet underground, and San Francisco Heritage credits it as the first subway station built west of Chicago. It was christened Laguna Honda, after the reservoir up the hill, and only renamed later for the neighborhood the tunnel had just created out of sand dunes. The old name is still cut into the stonework above the escalators on K, L and M.

The station's cavernous, half-lit interior has been used as a film set twice, in Dirty Harry (1971) and Milk (2008), which is a strange kind of afterlife for a commuter stop.

2. Powell & Market: the station that is also a machine

At the southern end of both Powell-Hyde and Powell-Mason, the cable car does not loop around a curve like a normal terminus. It stops on a circular turntable, and the crew, sometimes helped by whoever is standing nearby, physically pushes the entire car around by hand until it points back up the hill.

It works because there is nothing else it could do. A cable car has no engine and no reverse gear: it grips a moving cable or it does not, so at the end of the line someone has to spin the whole vehicle instead of the wheels.

3. Bay & Taylor: the other turntable, at the edge of Fisherman's Wharf

Powell-Mason's northern terminus does the same trick a few blocks from the water. Tourists queue on the sidewalk specifically to watch the manual spin, which makes Bay & Taylor one of very few places in an American city where the transit stop is also the show.

Between the two turntables and the crossovers at each end of Powell-Hyde and Powell-Mason, the Powell Street cable cars are essentially a single-track railway that reverses direction by rotating the vehicle rather than switching a signal.

4. Chinatown-Rose Pak: the deepest hole ever dug for a building in San Francisco

The T Third Street extension's northern terminus opened in 2023 roughly 100 feet down, and building it required, according to the project's own account, the deepest excavation ever dug in the city. The escalator ride alone gives away how far underground you are before you see a platform.

It is also the only stop in the network built as a piece of public art on purpose: a 100 foot mural by Tomie Arai runs along the mezzanine, one of ten permanent artworks commissioned for the Central Subway project.

5. 4th & King: three railways at one curb that barely acknowledge each other

This is where Muni's N and T lines stop directly outside Caltrain's San Francisco terminal, so a light rail platform, a diesel commuter railroad and (a few blocks off) the future high speed rail terminus all sit within sight of one another. There is no shared fare gate and no through ticketing: you walk from one system to the next across a sidewalk, not through a station.

It is less a transfer point than three separate railways that happen to have picked the same block of Mission Bay.

6. California & Market: the cable cars that never turn around

Unlike the Powell lines, California has no turntable at either end. Its cars are double-ended, with a grip and controls at both ends, so the crew simply switches to the other platform and drives the same car back the way it came.

It is the quieter, less photogenic solution to the exact same problem the Powell & Market turntable solves in public, and most riders never notice there is a design choice there at all.

7. Balboa Park: a station wedged into a freeway interchange

Balboa Park sits where the Muni surface lines, an elevated BART structure, City College of San Francisco and the I-280 interchange all converge at once. The BART platform runs above street level in the shadow of the freeway ramps, so arriving here feels less like reaching a neighborhood and more like surfacing inside a piece of highway engineering.

Muni's surface stop here dates to 1917; BART's elevated platform arrived in 1973, stacking two eras of transit construction on the same small patch of ground.

8. SF Zoo: a terminus that is exactly what it says

The L Taraval line simply ends where the zoo is, at the foggy southwestern edge of the city where Sloat Boulevard meets the ocean. Most metro networks dress up their termini with some civic name. San Francisco just wrote down where the tracks stopped.

The line opened in 1919, before the zoo itself had fully taken shape, so the name has stuck around longer than most of what it originally described.

9. Yerba Buena/Moscone: a train station inside a convention center's basement

This T line stop, opened in 2023, exists mainly to move conference attendees in and out of the Moscone Center without them ever reaching the street. On a quiet weekday between events it can feel like the emptiest room in the entire Central Subway, then a trade show lets out and it fills in minutes.

It is a rare case of a city building underground rail infrastructure primarily to serve a building rather than a neighborhood.

10. Duboce & Noe: where the streetcar drives into a hole in someone's hillside

The N Judah does not disappear into an engineered subway entrance so much as vanish into the base of a hill in the middle of the Duboce Triangle, at the mouth of the Sunset Tunnel, which opened on 21 October 1928 and runs 4,232 feet to Carl and Cole.

There is no grand portal architecture, just houses, a fence and then a streetcar-sized hole. Drivers keep mistaking it for a road, with predictable results.