With San Francisco’s MUNI system in disarray, and climate change fueling wildfires across the state, it’s more important than ever to embrace sustainable public transit. Here’s how one family is making an adventure out of it.
Dogpatch resident Mc Allen (that’s “Mack” for those who love vowels) met me near the Embarcadero with the wearied face I’ve come to recognize as that of a full-time parent. His two young children, Poppy (8) and Lincoln (6), were zipping around the block with the indefatigable agility of cheetah cubs. We clambered onto the 2-Clement bus, one of the many lines that connects the city’s dense, urban employment centers on the east with its sleepier, residential mom & pop west side, in an effort to complete Allen’s ambitious #TotalMuniSummer goal: one summer, every Muni line, end to end. Our journey turned into a trip through time and emotion—from work to play, studiousness to stress, adulthood to childhood—and through a city that is scrambling to connect itself.
Though inspired by San Francisco Chronicle journalists Heather Knight and Peter Hartlaub’s #TotalMuni marathon earlier this year, Allen says his far more comprehensive effort is still a less ambitious feat. He’s chronicling every week of this challenge on Curbed, including this bleak write-up of our 2-Clement trip.
“Their accomplishment is way more impressive, since they did it in a single day,” Allen explains. “They took sixty lines. They had to get on, ride it at least one stop, and get off—and do all of them in a single day. I could never do that…But we’re doing 70 lines. For example, the 30 and the 30X take different routes, so we’re doing both.” Still, he insisted their challenge is lesser: “We get to go at our own pace, go to libraries and parks, and explore the city. We have the option to just bail on a day if we don’t want to go—[Knight and Hartlaub] didn’t. They had to run.”
It became more apparent as the bus got crowded and lurched uphill through the Tenderloin and the Fillmore, that Poppy and Lincoln perhaps weren’t feeling up to it. Squabbling bitterly, they paused only briefly to enjoy a storybook Allen had brought along, but after that, they were forced into a détente on separate sides of the aisle.
Perhaps because their crankiness was bladder-related, Allen explained that his Total Muni quest had opened his eyes to the needs of regular San Franciscans needing to relieve themselves, not to mention the disabled, who rely on the bus to get around.
“We really need to have a dedicated, dignified provision of public toilets in the city,” Allen explained. He’s been on several Muni busses that go out of service in the middle of the route, one of the most common reasons being public defecation on the bus. “Most of the ends of the lines have bathrooms for the operators, that aren’t accessible to the public. Hopefully safe injection sites will make drug use less prevalent, but we need something similar for toilets, too.”
As the children’s bickering faded into an ambient backdrop with the quiet chaos of the urban morning, I recalled with mild shame my own stubbornness as a child, prone to bouts of feverish melodrama and anguish wherever my parents took me. Sometimes it was a museum or a historic landmark, sometimes it was just the dentist’s office, but nevertheless the inertia of a suburban upbringing drew me to my room and my toys, with increasing resistance to go anywhere else. My busy working parents were trying to show me the world, and I showed them a grimace in return.
“I used to say that kids are your cruelest mirror,” Allen says, “because they will revisit upon you all your old sins…And there’s nothing you can do about it.” That’s the only poetry we get from Mack that day, though I first learned of him as an amateur poet who frequently read from his collection on street corners or on buses. He’s reticent about his art that day, and instead seems to regard Poppy and Lincoln as his main oeuvre, growing into restless autonomy in fits and bursts, just like a poet’s work.
Let’s try a different metaphor: even in their sourest moods, children love challenges, and Allen is making the city into a 49 square-mile board game, with buses as chess pieces, to coax out a begrudging love of their hometown. In that regard, Total Muni Summer is totally working.
“Is Japantown a town?” a suddenly chipper Poppy asks her father, though she seems to know the answer.
“It’s a neighborhood, just like Dogpatch, just like Chinatown. It’s part of San Francisco. You don’t need to be Japanese to live there,” Allen jokes. For a time, this humor brings peace upon our vessel.
In some ways, the Muni system has behaved like a petulant child toward its dependents, quietly starving its busiest lines of roughly a third of their frequencies to service temporary shuttles during the Twin Peaks Tunnel shutdown. District 5 Supervisor Vallie Brown has called for an investigation into the unannounced Muni service cuts, and City Hall is generally fuming at the agency. Revamping Muni has been an appealing promise for politicians since Mayor Willie Brown promised a better Muni system within 100 days (spoiler: it didn’t work), but with growing tensions between long-term repairs and regular service coming to a head, the political stakes may be higher than ever.
In this context, Total Muni Summer is not just a transit nerd’s game, but a valiant exercise in strengthening the public trust.
Allen remains confident, however, that the real culprit tearing apart our fragile social contract is cars. If automobile owners were more amenable to losing their private storage space on public streets, buses could run more efficiently on dedicated lanes, and public trust in Muni could be restored without any competition from corporate ride-hailing companies.
“The bus serves people who are disabled way more than I expected,” Allen said. “Low-floor boarding is so much better, but having clear curb space for boarding is super-important. There are a lot of bus stops where there is no curb space, there’s just parking. That’s absurd For a person who is mobility-challenged, that’s basically not a bus stop. Frankly, the MTA could fix that tomorrow.”
The bus snaked its way through the gaudy hills of Pacific Heights, down California Street and onto Clement Street in the Inner Richmond. We indeed did pass several stops where passengers were forced to step between parked cars to board, much to our dismay. As we approached its terminus, just across from Park Presidio Place, Allen breathed a sigh of relief. The ordeal was over—for now. He’d still have to cross six lanes of traffic, fending off aggressive drivers in search of a restroom and a playground.
Allen apologized effusively for the children’s rowdiness, but I waved it off. It was lunchtime, and if I didn’t get some calories in my belly soon, I, too, would become an incorrigible grouch. So we parted ways into our separate futures, each a bumpy ride with uncertain stops and starts, some entrances easier than others. We promise the cheap metaphors end here.
Next year, the children will start walking to school alone, and they’ll be allowed to ride Muni on their own, too. “Bum ba bum bum,” Lincoln starts to sing, “I love Muni.”
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(Correction: an earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to the Twin Peaks tunnel as the Sunset Tunnel. We got our tunnels crossed. The Beacon regrets the error. - Ed.)
