Your place to share stories on and off the bus.
Photo by Stuart of Caliber SF
I spotted this photo in my RSS feed Tuesday morning. It was taken by Stuart of Caliber SF. Aside from simple beauty, it reminds me of a droid from Star Wars. That’s always a good thing.
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Photo by Flickr user Whole Wheat Toast
The following was originally left by Amy as a comment on “My own personal N-Judah.”
I used to always end up barely making it onto the last 17 leaving from West Portal — it stops at 11:30 on weekdays or something ridiculous. I could’ve always taken the M, but when it’s foggy and cold and nearly midnight, not to mention dark, if I saw that 17 as the M was pulling into West Portal station, I would take it. I would always be the last person left on the bus when I got off at my stop. I always figured it was because the SFSU kids were usually the only other people on the bus and they all got off near the dorms. One day though, the 17 had a new driver and about 10 minutes before the bus was to approach my stop, he stopped and said it was the end of the line.
I asked him why he was letting everyone off early, and he looked surprised. He then explained that the actual end of the line was at the Lake Merced entrance to ParkMerced because the bus had to go home eventually, and then asked if it was my first time taking the 17. And that was when I found out that the former driver had been going out of his way to drop me off at the stop right across the street from my apartment. I wish I had gotten the name or at least the number of the bus before I left the city — that kind man always, without fail, made sure I got to my stop, and I never realised he was going out of his way in time to thank him.
Oh, how we love an uplifting Muni story. Got one? Send it here.
By now, you might’ve seen a video floating around the intertubes called, to varying discrepancies, “A trip down Market Street.” If not, go watch it. If our guess is correct, and you have this soft spot for San Francisco in the middle of all your frustrations and angst, you’ll love this footage of our city in its simpler, yet equally fascinating days. It shows the view from a streetcar traveling east toward the Ferry Building, on a Market Street free of cars (easier to do in those days), with pedestrians and horses and buggies crossing the tracks ever so lawlessly.
Owing to the popularity of that video, we came across the above program, sponsored by The Long Now Foundation. The very long program is broken up into easy-to-digest chapters. The un-embeddable chapters we want to call your attention to are: Fillmore Hill Cable Car (lots of great footage of Fillmore and other old cable car lines) and South of Market (which includes archival footage of the Transbay Terminal around 1941). There might be other transit-related bits, but frankly, we haven’t had enough time to watch it all. Here’s a link to the entire program, but you can watch it by the chapter.
The man responsible for the footage, Rick Prelinger, will be presenting more archival video of San Francisco on December 4 at the Herbst Theater.
Matt Baume sends the above photo (we edited it slightly to protect the guilty), along with these words:
Thought this might make good fodder for a post. Maybe you’d want to mask his face before posting? Personally I’d leave it as is. Anyway, we can all agree: this person is gross.
Yes, we can agree with Matt here. But I’m sure nail-clipping on Muni has its ardent defenders. As always, we’d love to hear from all sides. But remember: Play nicely.
This looks like something straight outta Muni. So says BART rider Erich:
Good thing I’m Hungry. Eggroll and green beans. Some sort of Chinese.
Got a story about your BART commute to share with us? Go for it.
A tweet from @toddster last night included the above photo and alluded to the following:
Still on BART. This dude stared at his right hand for a good six minutes straight.
All right, folks, let’s hear it: What was the guy looking at/pondering/worrying over? And before you go too far, there’s no hair on that palm (but if you want to Photoshop some in, by all means. And then send that to us, eh?).