Unfamiliar bus a vehicle for adventure
I found myself a bit adrift in North Beach the other afternoon. A lunch appointment hadn’t worked out, and a story idea had fizzled. I needed a bit of a change, so when a Muni bus came along, I jumped on without knowing where it was going.
Why not? I said to myself. Here’s a blank spot in a blank afternoon. I could be an urban adventurer, all for the price of a high-class cup of coffee.
It was the 8-Bayshore bus, headed from North Beach through Chinatown, into downtown, and to the south of South of Market. It crept through the city streets, picking through traffic, stopping it seemed at every corner. Typical slow Muni bus to nowhere.
But then the driver turned on the Bayshore Freeway and the bus rattled and banged its way down the highway, like an old horse escaped from the barn.
We turned off at San Bruno Avenue, where there is a big sign: “Welcome to the Portola, San Francisco’s Garden District.”
The bus headed down the San Bruno Avenue shopping district, and then snaked through a whole range of southern neighborhoods — Visitacion Valley, west on windswept Geneva Avenue through the Crocker Amazon, nipping past a sliver of the Outer Mission, a bit of Ocean View and the Ingleside. The end of the line is on Ocean Avenue near City College.
None of this route is very remarkable, except that it is so un remark Francisco, able. This is the San Francisco that is off the radar, the least famous half of one of the most famous cities in the world. I’d been out there before, of course, but not very often.
There are no tourist attractions in this part of town, no famous restaurants, no classic Victorians or techie hot spots, not even a movie theater.
The most famous landmarks are a big, blue water tank that towers over the Portola district and the Cow Palace on Geneva Avenue, just over the county line.
Over the hills to the north, there are glimpses of the new towers of San like a mirage.
What you see from the Bayshore bus is mostly single-family houses. Very few of them have lawns or front yards. A smattering of small apartment houses is in the mix.
Nearly every shopping area has a library, a fire station, a bank branch, a real estate office, a Laundromat or two, a string of mom-and-pop restaurants. It’s a self-contained world, connected to the rest of the city by Muni buses.
On the ride, it is easy to see how the southern neighborhoods reflect the changing demographics of San Francisco. The Portola and Visitacion Valley have substantial Asian populations. The Ingleside is more than half Chinese.
If the guidebooks to the city mention these neighborhoods at all, they are called “unassuming” or “not well known.” Yet when you look around at the people on the 8-Bayshore bus and the folks on the street in these neighborhoods, you see the real San Franciscans — the working people who make the city what it is.
And the glue that binds the two halves of San Francisco is Muni and its network of buses and rail lines. It is the largest single institution in San Francisco. Customers get on Muni vehicles more than 700,000 times every weekday. Its buses and trains are everywhere.
The city’s elites — the men and women who set the tone for San Francisco — almost never ride public transit. They drive, or take a taxi or other ride-hailing service, or ride bikes. But the rest are jammed into the 38-Geary bus, or the 14-Mission, or maybe packed inside one of the subway trains at rush hour. That’s real life in the city.
The veteran riders have learned the tricks of the trade: how to get a seat on the outbound K, L, or M car in the Muni Metro subway by riding inbound for a station or two. How to use the Muni app to take one bus line instead of another going in the same direction. It is an art, like a sailor who knows the tides and currents. It’s tribal almost.
There is a culture on the buses and trains, too. Strangers never talk to each other, except on the N or T cars going to and from the ballpark. It is considered good form to give an older lady a seat; bad form to hog the seat on the aisle. Kids used to play loud music on the bus. Now it’s all quiet, the Christian Science reading room with cell phones.
But still there are surprises, something around every corner. Which is why getting aboard a bus without knowing where it is going is one of the last of the small adventures.