Central Subway

Started: 2022-11-29 20:20:02

Submitted: 2022-11-29 22:15:57

Visibility: World-readable

Riding MUNI's Central Subway on opening day

On Saturday, the 19th of November, for the first time in my life, a new transit tunnel in San Francisco opened.

The last new transit tunnel to open in San Francisco was the Market Street Subway, which started serving MUNI trains in 1980, and finally opened to through service on the full MUNI metro network in 1982. (The Embarcadero portal opened in 1998 to connect the N-Judah line to Caltrain, but I'm going to argue that was a tunnel spur and not a real tunnel, for the purposes of the "first time in my life" claim.)

We attended a birthday in the East Bay on Saturday morning, then headed into San Francisco in the afternoon to ride the Central Subway. Because of our East Bay diversion we decided to drive to Orinda and take BART from there, riding through the BART tunnel through the Oakland Hills and the Transbay Tube to Powell Street Station.

When we reached Powell Street Station we took the long walk along the station concourse to find the transfer tunnel connecting the station to the new Union Square station. As we walked along the concourse I saw signs pointing the way, proving we were on the right track (and suggesting that the Central Subway was real, not just an illusion): first there was a sticker on a floor pointing the way, followed by an upright directional sign.

Then we reached the left turn where no left turn had previously existed, leaving the old station box for Powell Street Station and crossing into a new station concourse, featuring a brand-new bright-white floor and lit from above by LED squares. There was a big temporary sign announcing the Central Subway, and people in high-visibility jackets standing around offering directions and assistance. The walls of the long concourse looked like they were the raw concrete piles that had been drilled from the surface to protect the box as it was excavated, then left in place rather than covered with subway tiles. In the middle of the concourse fare gates (left open for the soft opening, so we could ride for free until the T line is connected in January) led to a gentle ramp that led to a steep escalator. We descended to the platform level, deep enough so the new tunnel could pass under the BART station box, under large beams bracing the sides of the station. As we descended to the platforms the walls loomed high above us, giving the impression of descending deep into an open trench, much deeper than it was wide.

We reached the platform level just ahead of the next train. The platform was comfortably crowded, with other people waiting to ride the new train on opening day. We boarded the train when it arrived and rode north to Chinatown.

Chinatown is the current northern terminus of the line, but the tunnels extend to North Beach, promising future service there. It's not clear when the service might expand again; MUNI took ten years to build this tunnel after twenty years of promising a better transit connection to Chinatown after demolishing the Embarcadero Freeway after the Loma Prieta earthquake. I wasn't sure whether to consider the new subway a shining new example of transit or a costly boondoggle; but on its opening day I decided to go for "exciting new subway" and leave it at that.

Chinatown's brand-new subway station is also deep underground, with three separate escalator rides required to rise from the platform level up to the street.

The longest escalator runs opposite a piece of permanent art that references Chinese papercut art, one of two large papercut-inspired pieces of art in the new station. The whole station was full of references to Chinese culture and life in Chinatown.

We emerged onto ground level in Chinatown, where the brand-new glass-walled station building sat surrounded by low-rise mixed-use buildings in San Francisco's most-densely-populated neighborhood. (I think I saw the construction hoarding set up around the station while it was under construction, probably in 2017.) We headed up the hill a few blocks to the cable car museum, to see artifacts of an older San Francisco transit system and the winding sheaves that run the cables that still run under the streets of the city today, pulling tourists and locals up and over the hills and down the other side.

We returned to Chinatown Station to ride back to the other end of the line.

When we descended to the platform I looked into the tunnels leading to North Beach. There were trains parked in each tunnel, and behind the trains I could see a gate blocking the tunnel.

For its soft opening, MUNI is running a shuttle service through the new tunnels covering the four new stops on the line: Chinatown, Union Square, Yerba Buena/Moscone, and 4th & Brannan. We boarded the inbound train and rode through the underground stations, crossing under Market Street and realigning with the street grid in SoMa before emerging onto 4th Street just beyond I-80. We rode along the street for a couple of blocks before stopping at the current terminus, at Brannan.

In the far corner of SoMa, at dusk, three blocks from the Caltrain station, there was very little to do but disembark onto the island platform in the middle of the street and wait for the train to drive several blocks south, cross over to the opposite track, and reverse direction to pick us up again for the trip to Union Square.

I took a selfie as we rode north, capturing not only me but also my MEWNI catbus t-shirt, showing what the catbus from My Neighbor Totoro would look like operating the 38 Geary line.

We returned to Union Square and disembarked, having achieved my goal of riding the new line end-to-end in both directions on opening day. (I will still need to come back in January when the full service opens and the T line finally splits from the K line and runs all the way from Bayview to Chinatown.)

We dropped by Udupi Palace in the Mission to eat dosa before heading back under the bay to Orinda, and from there driving back home to Santa Cruz.

I took more pictures of the Central Subway than I could fit here; the rest are here: Photos on 2022-11-19.