page_title: Muni Metro
section_title: Market Street subway
hierarchical_section_title: Muni Metro / History / Market Street subway
caption_attribution_description: San Francisco: Car 1306 is at the near end of a two-car train of U.S. Standard Light Rail Vehicles (Boeing-Vertol LRVs), waiting at Embarcadero station to depart for St. Francis Circle on line M Ocean View, in 1993.
context_page_description: The Muni Metro is a light rail system serving San Francisco, California, United States, operated by the San Francisco Municipal Railway, a division of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. With an average weekday ridership of 157,700 passengers as of the fourth quarter of 2019, Muni Metro is the United States' second busiest light rail system. Muni Metro operates a fleet of 151 Breda light rail vehicles, which are being supplemented and replaced by Siemens S200 SF LRVs.
  Muni Metro is the modern incarnation of the traditional streetcar system that had served San Francisco since the late 19th century. While many streetcar lines in other cities, and even in San Francisco itself, were converted to buses after World War II, five lines survived until the early 1980s, when they were rerouted into the newly built Market Street subway. The system today traverses a number of different types of rights of way, including tunnels, reserved surface trackage with at-grade street crossings, and streetcar sections operating in mixed traffic; surface stops range from high-platform stations to traditional curbside streetcar stops.
context_section_description: Original plans for the BART system drawn up in the 1950s envisioned a double-decked subway tunnel under Market Street (known as the Market Street subway) in downtown San Francisco; the lower deck would be dedicated to express trains, while the upper would be served by local trains whose routes would spread south and west through the city. However, by 1961 these plans were altered; only a single BART route would travel through the city on the lower deck, while the upper deck would be served by the existing Muni streetcar routes. The new tunnel would be connected to the existing Twin Peaks Tunnel. The new underground stations would feature high platforms, and the older stations would be retrofitted with the same, which meant that the PCCs could not be used in them. Hence, a fleet of new light rail vehicles was ordered from Boeing-Vertol, but were not delivered until 1979–80, even though the tunnel was completed in 1978. The K and M lines were extended to Balboa Park during this time, providing further connections to BART. (The J line also saw an extension there in 1991, which provided yet another BART connection at Glen Park.)
  On February 18, 1980, the Muni Metro was officially inaugurated, with weekday N line service in the subway. The Metro service was implemented in phases, and the subway was served only on weekdays until 1982. The K Ingleside line began using the Metro subway on weekdays on June 11, 1980, the L Taraval and M Ocean View lines on December 17, 1980, and lastly the J Church line on June 17, 1981. Meanwhile, weekend service on all five lines (J, K, L, M, N) continued to use PCC cars operating on the surface of Market Street through to the Transbay Terminal, and the Muni Metro was closed on weekends. At the end of the service day September 19, 1982, streetcar operations on the surface of Market Street were discontinued entirely, the remaining PCC cars taken out of service, and weekend service on the five light rail lines was temporarily converted to buses. Finally, on November 20, 1982, the Muni Metro subway began operating seven days a week. 
  At the time, there were no firm plans to revive any service on the surface of Market Street or return PCCs to regular running. However, tracks were rehabilitated for the 1983 Historic Trolley Festival, and the inauguration of the F line, served by heritage streetcars, followed in 1995.
  By the late 1980s, Muni scheduled 20 trains per hour (TPH) through the Market Street subway at peak periods, with all trains using the crossover west of Embarcadero station to reverse direction.. To allow for high frequencies on the surface branches, eastbound trains were combined at West Portal and Duboce Portal, and westbound trains split at those locations. Two-car N Judah trains and one-car J Church trains (each 10TPH) combined at the Duboce Portal, while two-car L Taraval trains (10TPH) alternately combined with two-car M Ocean View and K Ingleside (each 5 TPH) trains at West Portal to form four-car trains. However, this provided suboptimal service; many inbound trains did not arrive at the portals in time to combine into longer trains.
caption: A train of Boeing LRVs at Embarcadero station in 1993
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