Geary a mess of buses, cars, pedestrians, plans
Whenever you get tired of the San Francisco in the tourist magazines — cable cars, Chinatown, high-tech towers, the Castro, all that — step aboard the 38-Geary Muni bus and head out to the Richmond District.
The 38-Geary is a trip in itself — a bus ride through every part of the city, from downtown to the Pacific Ocean, right through the heart of the Richmond.
As every San Franciscan knows, all Geary is divided into two parts: Geary Street, which runs from Market Street to Van Ness Avenue, and Geary Boulevard, which is what the street is called west of Van Ness.
You could make the case that Geary Boulevard is a textbook example of the civic paralysis that sometimes grips San Francisco. This is a city with a split personality. Sometimes change happens with blinding speed. At other times, nothing ever changes.
The city and its citizens have been arguing over what to do about Geary Boulevard since the last old Muni streetcar rattled down the street on the last weekend of 1956 — more than 60 years ago.
Geary got a new look in 1959 — a center median strip planted with trees. The hope then was to turn this main street of the Richmond District into San Francisco’s version of the Great White Way, like Broadway in New York.
Geary has all the potential in the world — a street where you can do anything. Eat, drink and be merry, be born in one of the hospitals, or be laid to rest in the city’s only columbarium. There is a restaurant row between Arguello Boulevard and 25th Avenue — 81 eating places offering food in dozens of ethnic varieties. The Richmond has a big Asian population and a grand Russian Orthodox cathedral, an Irish-themed bar run by a Korean family. It’s the San Francisco mix.
But Geary, the district’s main thoroughfare, is a mess, jammed with traffic — cars, buses, delivery trucks. It’s dangerous for people on foot, too. The city estimates that pedestrians crossing Geary Boulevard are eight times more likely to be hit by a car than the citywide average.
The 38-Geary bus is the main line through the Richmond. It is Muni’s busiest route, carrying an average of 52,000 passengers every weekday, more than twice as many as ride Caltrain.
The 38 runs day and night and comes in several variations. The 38 local is the milk run, making 97 stops every round trip. It’s slow. If the 38 local is on time, its average speed is only 6.82 mph. The Geary limited, rebranded as the Geary Rapid two years ago, makes fewer stops and can get from 48th Avenue to Market Street in 36 minutes. Average speed: 9.66 mph.
The buses are usually packed with passengers, like the proverbial sardines in a can. And the service is uneven.
“When I was a kid in school in the Richmond,” Michael Smith said, “we used to have a riddle: What’s green and yellow and comes in bunches? The 38-Geary. The buses are different colors now, but it’s still true. The 38 is the 38.”
The city has been trying to fix transit on Geary for years; it is the boulevard of broken plans. A subway has been proposed, a light-rail line, a combination subway and lightrail arrangement. Nothing much has changed,. It is what it is.
The current plan is called Bus Rapid Transit, which involves using conventional buses but eliminating stops, and building 1.7 miles of dedicated bus-only lanes, installing special traffic signals for buses, and having boarding areas in the middle of the street.
You can see an animation of the concept by Googling Geary Corridor Bus Rapid Transit.
Bus Rapid Transit is cheaper than rail and more flexible. It’s worked in Mexico City, San Jose and on AC Transit routes in Oakland. It may be cheaper than rail, but it’s still expensive — the Geary corridor version would cost $300 million.
In their usual slow way, city planners have gone through 10 years of negotiations, studies, debate and delays. There was a lot of opposition, mostly because of fears that construction would take years and be fatal to some of the small businesses on Geary. But finally, on Jan. 5, the Board of Supervisors, sitting as the County Transportation Authority, gave it the green light.
But this is San Francisco, and even a decade of talk is not enough. A group of Geary merchants and residents called San Franciscans for Sensible Transit filed a suit to block the project, which they say is too expensive and unnecessary. The lawsuit calls it “a grave error” and “a bus thruway which destroys the quality of life and the economic health of the Richmond District.”
So now it’s in the courts. But that’s San Francisco, where change can be fast, but the road to rapid transit is slower than a Muni bus bumping its way out Geary.