Market Street Railway produces a calendar each year featuring San Francisco’s historic streetcars and cable cars. The Museums in Motion calendar is an important project to us as both a thank you to members (included with membership of $100 or more) to raise funds for our non-profit work preserving historic transit.

We need your help to make the 2011 Museums in Motion calendar showcase both the streetcars and cable cars as part of the vibrant fabric of life in the City. With the threat of a $5 F-line fare, now more than we feel it’s important to show historic transit is not just a theme park ride for tourists, but is part of everyday life in San Francisco used by residents trying to get to work or to play.

See our 2010 calendar for examples from last year we hope to top. Well-composed scenes are preferred over tight shots of the cars.

Our goal is to show the cars at their best, so please only submit photos of San Francisco’s historic streetcar and cable car fleet. Do not submit photos feature Muni busses, modern Muni Metro light-rail trains, rail yards, stations and shelters, as well as unrestored, non-operational and run down vehicles.

How to submit a photo

If you’re already a member of Yahoo!’s free photo sharing service Flickr, all you need to do is tag your photos msrcalendarsubmission. If you’re not familiar with tagging on flicker, here’s some tips.

Photos should be landscape (horizontally) oriented, in color, and at least 3,000 x 2,000 pixels. We know many of you don’t post high-resolution versions to Flickr, but any photos submitted for publication should be available as camera original JPEG or RAW files without watermarks.

There’s no limit to how many photos you may submit by tagging them with msrcalendarsubmission, but please help us out by selecting what you think are your best and not simply tagging every photo.

We expect to make selections in april and will announce a date once set. If we select your photo, you will receive a complimentary advance copy of the calendar. Photographers are always fully credited with email address or website published in the calendar. Please help us spread the word so 2011 will be our best calendar yet.

Facing opposition from several members of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency Board, the SFMTA staff has withdrawn its proposal to raise the F-line streetcar fare from $2 to $5, a 150% increase. A detailed story, including the deep deficit Muni still faces, can be found at SF Streetsblog.

Last week, in a meeting on another subject, a member of the mayor’s staff told this writer that they had received far more complaints about the proposed F-line fare increase than any other part of the multi-faceted Muni budget package.

To be sure, Muni finds itself in dire financial straits, affecting all parts of the system. For example, the detailed service reduction proposals released today call for F-line service to end by midnight instead of 1 a.m. as now. They also call for slightly reducing evening and late night frequency on all streetcar lines, including the F, one of Muni’s most heavily ridden nighttime routes. But while we believe this will overload the F-line even more at night, we understand that it must share the burden with other Muni lines.

What we did not understand is why one popular line should be singled out for punitive measures apparently because of its success. It’s now clear than many community and business people saw it the same way.

Last fall, San Francisco kicked off a year long improvement program for Market Street including art, music, greenery and running trial programs to improve traffic flow.

In 2013, Market Street is scheduled to be repaved and more than just laying asphalt, it’s an opportunity to make structural improvements such as widening or narrowing the sidewalks, relocate boarding islands and create taxi drop off pockets. To learn as much as possible before starting that design process, a trial program has underway since the end of September to test whether diverting private cars off of Market Street can reduce congestion for other users. Cars heading east on Market have been diverted at Eighth and again at Sixth Streets to see if what the effect would be of nudging drivers onto the parallel streets in SOMA where there is less bike and transit ridership.

So far the results have been encouraging: cars diverted off Market aren’t bunching up any of the parallel streets and Muni lines sped up by 1% from just those two changes. If you’re on a bike the difference is night and day, traveling downtown is no longer a matter of life or death.

One lessen already learned from the trial is Eighth Street just has too much going on at the corner with pedestrians exiting Civic Center Station, shuttle busses and a boarding island to be good location for cars and bikes to negotiate around each other.

Starting tomorrow, January 26, that mandatory turn will move two blocks up to Tenth Street where the pedestrian volume crossing the street is lower and there are no boarding islands for cyclists to negotiate along with the car traffic. The new arrangement will be evaluated over the next six weeks.