Muni, Muni, Read All About It

Photo by Heather Champ

Love the smell of ink and paper? You can read all about public transit in that old-school, paper way.

Four cool public transit books:

1. San Francisco Muni. The newest of the lot, “Hop aboard and trace Muni’s construction, expansion, operations, competitors, labor issues, and finances through two world wars to chronicle the growth of the “people’s railroad” into America’s seventh-largest public transit system.”
2. San Francisco Cable Cars. “San Francisco’s cable cars are an internationally recognized symbol of the city, but they also have a long and fractious history.”
3. Street Cars of San Francisco. “This delightful book showcases this historic fleet with more than 120 pages of beautiful color photos of currently restored and active streetcars.”
4. Transit Maps of the World. “the first and only comprehensive collection of historic and current maps of every rapid-transit system on earth.”

Sarah B. from The Richmond Blog sent us a tip about a new book coming out about Muni. From the blog, Inside the Outside Lands:

Transit historian Grant Ute has coauthored with Walter Vielbaum, Robert Townley, and the late Philip Hoffman and Cameron Beach (the transit guys are very collaborative) to produce San Francisco’s Municipal Railway: Muni. A large-format 144-page book from Arcadia Publishing, this photo-history comes out in time for Muni’s 2012 Centennial and covers the railway’s development to date. If you can, I recommend you buy it at the one of my favorite places, the Market Street Railway Museum at 77 Steuart Street near the Ferry Building.

Click over to Inside the Outside Lands to read more about the other historical books fresh off of the presses.

Oh, and if you want more ideas about what to read on the bus, the awesome blog Between the Lines is documenting books spotted on Muni.

Got other good Muni reads? We wanna know.