Octavia at Elgin Park
Duboce is not exactly in line with Division, which is not exactly perpendicular to Divisadero, which zigs to become Castro right where Duboce crosses.
Is Mission one block away from Market? Of course it is, when we don’t count Minna or Stevenson.
Wait, you mean Valencia, don’t you? Valencia is 15 blocks long and ends at Market on one end at Mission on the other. How could you say Market and Mission are only one block away from each other when Valencia stretches for over a mile between the two?
Perhaps we should say San Jose and Mission are together. San Jose goes from being the major outbound arterial to El Camino in Daly City, yet ends without fanfare near Fair Oaks as a dinky residential street at the outskirts of the Inner Mission.
How about the streets named after the planets? They should be together in one neighborhood, right? Neptune is one block from Venus with Mercury and asteroid Ceres on either side. Halfway across the city off of 17th we find Mars across from Saturn, both below Uranus Terrace! Oh wait, maybe I do understand this a little better! Perhaps it would be better to keep the gas giants separate from Venus and Mars!
Beach must be by the beach, and Bay by the Bay, but wouldn’t we rather say Embarcadero travels the piers by the bay, and that The Great Highway is the king of La Playa?
And the question asked, “Do you go to Twenty-Fifth?” is a loaded with misdirection if asked on Market outbound. Twenty-Fifth Street in the Mission by SF General Hospital is not even close to 25th Avenue that can take you to Land’s End Beach! Even a simple, “I need Tenth.” can have you end up in the Richmond district versus SOMA (South of Market.)
Every paragraph and sentence up to this point has omitted the word street or avenue, but not here. You must use street or avenue when mentioning a numbered byway. Streets are south of downtown and Market, and avenues are out by the Sunset or the Richmond. Adding to this confusion is the city named Richmond, which also gets interesting in making sure the person is asking for, the Richmond, or Richmond.
Do you go to Union? Did you mean Union Square or Union Street?
The 31 Balboa must go to Balboa Park BART, right? Nope. The Balboa bus will take you to the denizens of the deep in the Tenderloin, and not out by Geneva or Ocean by the connection to Daly City at the Balboa Park BART station. You’d actually have to get off at Highway 1 to take a 28 Golden Gate outbound to get to BART. But don’t get on in the wrong direction, because although this bus ends inbound on the 49 line which does go to Balboa BART, you would have added over an hour and a half, maybe two hours, to your journey!
The bottom line is the answer to your question can be yes, but it is not the quickest way. This brings us to the next qualifier about questioning a transfer.
“What’s the quickest way to get to . . .?”
Being a native New Yorker, I can’t help but be sarcastic in giving the correct answer: “Take a cab. Ride a bike. Text Uber.” But of course, they mean what is the fastest way using Muni. This can get interesting as our city population heads toward one million.*
We have more bus stops per mile than perhaps any other US city, and this slows us down to below eight m.p.h. What looks like a few minutes on a bus map in the shelter can drag on to an hour when stopping at every light on every corner, or stuck in traffic with unrestricted permitting of ride share vehicles.**
The Weird Curve can be found at any valley break or crest of hill. When Union Street heads up Russian Hill at Larkin, if you look at the curb distance, you see that Union does indeed jog a little in alignment as it plunges down to Polk and Van Ness. Another fascinating detail in league with the Weird Curve is the width of Market Street. Market does not have a uniform width. The building set backs are not the same either. I dare you to notice where the buildings move back to a wider stance when heading outbound.
Also interesting to note are residential street widths around town. As a street leaves the flats or a valley, and heads up a hill, the width narrows.
Take a look at the buildings along Market Street. They aren’t the same distance apart as you move inbound. They get closer together as you move towards the Ferry Plaza.
Indeed, it takes at least five years of living here and taking transit to get to know how the Weird Curve affects travel directions!
*in 2018 during the writing of the first edition, this looked true. The city was well on its way to one million inhabitants. After the Covid diaspora, however, San Francisco has lost over 100,000 residents. But no worries. Long term residents have seen this bust and boom cycle over and over. It’s the nature of the history of city as far back as the gold rush.
**after a dismal average speed in 2019, San Francisco has completed the central subway and the Van Ness Busway, both of which separate mass transit from vehicular surface traffic. These infrastructure improvements, complete with a new fleet of equipment, should lead to much better travel time statistics. More skip-stop rapid line runs have been added. Hopefully, recovery time and headways will revert to earlier schedule timetables, allowing operators more leeway to complete their trips, and increase safety and retention.
The Dao of Doug: A Bus Driver's Perspective 