A journey down Geary Boulevard

And why we should have better transit

This post is some personal thoughts about why we need better transit on Geary Blvd in San Francisco. It’s also the first thing I’ve written in a long time, so bear with me.

This is Geary Blvd.

It’s an east-west corridor that starts at Market St, near the Montgomery station and runs all the way to Sutro Heights, a park by the beach. Along the way it crosses through old and new, rich and poor, commercial and residential. Traveling along Geary Blvd in the 38 or 38R Muni bus, you can see the tremendous amount of life and diversity in San Francisco.

I took the bus a while ago starting out at Market St and ending at Geary Blvd and 6th St. Waiting at the bus stop, I was surrounded by the tall, looming towers of the Financial District. It was a Saturday afternoon at the tail end of the Ferry building farmers’ market, and the bus was relatively empty at the first stop. As it lurched forward onto Geary and made its stops, passengers started piling in.

There were Asian-American seniors, some carrying carts and bags filled with groceries. There were well-dressed young people, listening to music, reading books. As the bus passed through the Tenderloin, I heard the occasional yelling and looked out the window to see shop keepers cleaning the sidewalk, and a family walking down the street, the kids jumping around and running down the street. An African American man with a limp slowly lumbered onto the bus.

The bus shook as it climbed up the hills and the scenery shifted dramatically as the gradient of the road changed. I found this fascinating, but others on the bus seemed unfazed. As we passed Van Ness, a group of skateboarders got on. They wore hoodies and ripped jeans, one of them balancing his board with one foot, another squeezing his board between his knees.

Geary Blvd is a “stroad”. And it got wider as we passed Van Ness and inched closer to Japantown. It reaches a peak around the Gough street intersection. Looking to your left, you can see the famous hills of San Francisco in the background, a steep drop down Gough St, and the imposing facade of the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption.

As we passed through Japantown, we neared the infamous Geary expressway. On the right, the commercial district of Japantown with the iconic Peace Pagoda, and closer to the expressway, the AMC Kabuki theater. On the left are the residential buildings and parks of the Fillmore district. This expressway was created in a past era to feed the desire for fast auto travel and intentionally divide the Fillmore and Japantown neighborhoods.

After we exit these historic neighborhoods, the bus passes through a more nondescript area, with several hospitals and and chain establishments like Target and Chase bank. The transition to Richmond was much more noticeable, with the iconic pastel painted residences with bay windows and shops on the bottom level.

At this point, the skateboarders had left, and the bus was filled with the demographics more common to the Richmond district, Asian-American seniors and families, and yuppies. As we reached the numbered avenues, fog covered the sky and the surroundings felt a little darker. One thing that didn’t change was the width of the street. In downtown, Geary feels more like a city street, but out here there seemed to be an asymmetry between the dense multi-use buildings and the wide six lane road, divided by a median. I learned later that this was due to a lack of proper “enclosure”.

I finally got off at around Geary and 6th Ave, to visit Arsicault bakery, a friend, and later get pizza from my favorite restaurant — Pizzetta 211. (I’ll talk about how much I love pizza in California in a later post)

Geary Blvd transports people from all backgrounds in San Francisco. It has more than 52,000 riders every single day — one of the most traveled bus routes in the US. The linked SF Chronicle article provides more information to justify giving the route much more attention. This is more than enough to justify light rail, a subway, or even BART.

There used to be a streetcar line before 1950, but it was torn out in a dark era in US history where the country collectively decided (or at least powerful car lobbies) that cars were the ultimate form of transportation and that any other form needed to be torn out and replaced with buses and wide roads.

Today, we know better. It’s time to act and bring back rail on Geary. Trains can transport more people, and subways can do so more quickly and reliably than buses without being at the whim of traffic and rogue drivers. It looks like the SFMTA and other organizations are finally starting to consider this. I hope this time, plans turn into action.