The records of San Francisco transit

San Francisco transit is really four systems sharing seven miles of city: Muni Metro, three cable car lines, a fleet of vintage streetcars and BART running underneath everything. Stack that much infrastructure from four different eras into one small footprint and you get some genuine superlatives, not the marketing kind, the kind you can check.

Here are the numbers that hold up, with where each one comes from. A few things the game's own hint data will not tell you honestly, because dailymetro.live/sf uses average figures per line rather than real per-station ridership, which is exactly why the busiest and emptiest stops below are sourced from BART's own counts instead.

The oldest line and the newest stations

California has run since 1878 and is the oldest cable car line still operating anywhere in the world. At the other end of the timeline, three stations on the T Third Street line, Chinatown-Rose Pak, Union Square/Market Street and Yerba Buena/Moscone, all opened in 2023 as part of the Central Subway, making them the newest stops in the network by well over a decade.

That is a 145 year gap between the oldest and newest ways to catch a ride in this city, and both ends of it are still running today.

The deepest dig and the deepest point

Chinatown-Rose Pak sits roughly 100 feet down, and the Central Subway project's own account of building it calls the excavation the deepest ever dug for a building in San Francisco. The Transbay Tube, which carries BART under the bay to Oakland, goes deeper still in absolute terms: its lowest point is 135 feet below sea level, reached by lowering 57 prefabricated sections onto the bay floor and bolting them together after the tube was built on land.

Nothing else in the network comes close on either measure. Everything else Muni or the cable cars run is at or near street level.

The busiest and the emptiest BART platform in the city

Skip the game's own ridership numbers for this one; they average across a whole line rather than counting individual stations, so they cannot answer it. According to BART's own station-level counts as reported on Wikipedia, Montgomery Street was the busiest BART station in San Francisco as of November 2025, with 14,087 average weekday riders, the highest figure systemwide. Glen Park, by the same count, was the quietest San Francisco BART stop at 3,433 riders a day, about a quarter of Montgomery's total despite sitting only two stops down the same line.

Those figures move month to month, so treat them as a snapshot rather than a permanent ranking, but the gap between a Financial District interchange and a residential neighborhood stop is the kind of thing that will not flip overnight.

The longest tunnel and the costliest mile

The Twin Peaks Tunnel opened on 3 February 1918, runs 2.27 miles under Twin Peaks, and was the longest tunnel built anywhere for streetcar traffic at the time. A century later, the T line's Central Subway extension set a very different kind of record: 1.7 miles of new underground track for a final cost of 1.578 billion dollars, which works out to roughly 928 million dollars per mile, easily the most expensive stretch of rail ever built in the city.

Between them, the two projects bracket just about the entire cost curve of digging under San Francisco, from horse-and-cart era engineering to twenty-first century tunnel boring machines.

The longest and shortest station names

By character count in the game's own station list, California & Market (Drumm) and Powell & Market (turntable) are tied for the longest name in the network, both landing at 27 characters once you count the parentheses. SF Zoo, the western terminus of the L line, is the shortest at six.

It is a small thing, but it says something about the network's two naming habits: cable car stops get a cross street and a parenthetical note, while Muni Metro just tells you what is at the end of the line.

No wheels touch the rail, so grades barely matter

One record the network holds without a single specific number attached: cable traction, the system behind every Powell-Hyde and Powell-Mason car, does not depend on friction between wheel and rail the way an ordinary train does. The car grips a moving cable running at a constant 9.5 mph and lets go to stop, which is why these lines can be routed up hills that would be far too steep for a conventional streetcar or light rail vehicle.

It is the reason the cable car network still exists at all on Nob Hill and Russian Hill, long after every other American city tore its own cable lines out.