The Super Bowl 50 committee wants to make San Francisco public transit even worse

The Super Bowl 50 Committee has a suggestion for San Francisco ahead of February’s Super Bowl at Levi’s Stadium: What if we could take San Francisco’s public transit system and make it worse?

The SF Examiner reports:

The committee planning Super Bowl City are asking that Muni’s overhead wires be taken down near Justin Herman Plaza, the San Francisco Examiner has learned, potentially disrupting service of Muni’s historic streetcars and wire-dependent buses.

Supervisor Jane Kim, whose district includes the plaza, said she thought the potential plan was well-known.

“Yeah, that’s real,” she said. “The [Super Bowl] committee has been very open about it. They’ve said that’s what they want.”

She added, “They’ve definitely been asking to take down the overhead wires on Market Street.”

Market Street, which is where most of the city’s major parades are held, cuts through the Financial District and hooks onward into the Mission District, and is perhaps the most significant transit hub in the city. Temporarily removing the bus wires for the “Super Bowl City” festival could cost a “seven-figure number,” according to the Examiner.

I grew up in the Bay Area, and all I have to say is: Are you joking?

San Francisco’s public transit system is a mildewed deck of playing cards stacked wobbly in the wind. It is the banana you find sitting on top of your refrigerator, melted into goop. It is a weasel with mange. I would say it’s like a system designed by children, except that children have dreams and are capable of feeling joy. Public transportation in San Francisco is the cleanliness of New York’s MTA, the whimsical reliability of Boston’s MBTA, and all the likelihood of getting from Point A to Point B of the Cincinnati Subway, which was shuttered in 1948.

Public transit in San Francisco is a patchwork of different networks -- the true subway (BART), the bus system (Muni), and the light rail system (Muni Metro) -- which then devolve into other systems as you leave the city proper. Basically any dwelling even near a subway station has a base rent of $2,000 a month, which is nice if and only if you’re a developer for Twitter. Should you lack that luxury, odds are you either a) drive everywhere, b) bike everywhere or c) spend huge portions of your day on a bus, creeping over heavily congested hills. (There’s also option D, take Uber or Lyft everywhere, which should be a joke but together form the backbone of the comings and goings of more than a few people in the city, the caveat being those people can still afford to live there in the first place.) To get those buses over those hills, many lines rely on overhead wires to power them.

In short: public transit in San Francisco is a plodding, inconvenient mess on its very best day, and now the NFL wants the city to tear a portion of it down.

No thank you.