Thanks to our friends at NextBus and the great liaison work of our webmaster Alex Zepeda, plus the graphic skills of our longtime designer David Dugan, we now have a live F-line map on our site where you can not only see where streetcars are on the F-line, but WHICH car is where. As the screenshot above shows, the icons Dave Dugan created for each streetcar now appear, along with the car number, to show you where they are on the line. It even shows where the cars are when they’re going to or from the F-line along the J-Church line. The rule is that streetcars are in service going to and from the carhouse, so you can ride them on the J-line. If you are ever told you can’t, please tell us so, and we’ll take it up with Muni.
This map is part of our new F-line live feature, which also provides a page with larger images of the cars on the line right now, which can be clicked to bring up a full profile of that car. And for those wondering what streetcars are in the shop right now, undergoing restoration, or awaiting restoration, well, we have a page for that too.
Thanks again to Michael Smith at NextBus and to Alex for their help on this. And special thanks to David Dugan, who created the icons for the streetcars that have become somewhat, well, iconic. In case you don’t know, we feature those icons on a variety of products at our San Francisco Railway Museum and here on our site, including a fleet poster with all the streetcar icons.
Get outta here! Thats AWESOME!
Excellent! This is especially great for us photographers trying to catch all the different cars out on the line. Thanks for all your efforts on this!
This is great!! I really like it!!
Now Muni needs to give the boat car (And really all of the one off vintage cars) a NextBus transponder ASAP
And for Muni supervisors, when our computers and laptops in the trucks are absent or not working, this is a backup line management tool.
This is great. You wouldn’t believe how many hours I’ve spent chasing down the cars, or just waiting for them, to take some pictures. Thanks a lot!
When I started studying Muni (late 1960’s), they had an electric headway recording system that sensed trolley shoes passing detectors on the overhead and sent a pulse to strip-chart recorders at Central Control. Even when I joined MSRy around 1983, what we have today would have seemed like science-fiction. Kudos to the crew whose creation allows us long distance members to follow the streetcars like we were scanning the planet from a starship.
Fascinating! The drawings move around the map just like the cars they represent. What is more, when a car leaves service it disappears from the map completely.
Excellent map, its great watching it!
I was just wondering what 8188 is i saw on the F line today, it is running around without a diagram next to it and i cant find a streetcar matching the number?
Great job. How I wish Chicago would bring back some of its street cars. Is there something like this for the cable cars?
@Matthew, 8188 is a bus number. If Muni is short either streetcars or qualified operators on a particular day, a bus can be sent out to fill a run.
@Jerry Hund: No, no similar system for cable cars, which do not carry GPS units and would need extra batteries to do so. Would be of limited use for riders anyway, at least on the Powell lines, because the cars run pretty frequently (and often have no room for extra passengers on most of the route anyway).