T-Third Line is old 15 Electric Streetcar; Bring Back Geary Electric Streetcar

Welcome back to service on April 7, 2007 the old 15 Electric Streetcar which became the 15-Third St bus line on June 23, 1940, now known as the T Third Electric Street carline. Geary Street also had a streetcar until shortly after WW2, and we look forward to its prompt return.

The Geary buses, both the standard 50 passenger and the articulated 75-100 passenger buses, must travel about 5 minutes apart with extra service during rush hour to accommodate the passengers going from the Financial District to the beach via Union Square shopping, Kaiser Hospitals (at Divisadero & 6th Ave) the Fillmore and the Richmond districts.

The private passenger automobile has proven itself to be a luxury at best and more often than not, a disaster to the environment, to the 42,000 people to lose their lives annually in car accidents, and to the thousands more seriously injured annually in car accidents, and totally incapable of providing fast, cheap, efficient transportation on a large scale. Trains and buses are obviously the best way to move large numbers of people. There will always be cars, taxi cabs, vans, and hopefully more bicycles, but for mass transit we need more trains and buses, and that funding must necessarily come from the federal budget, funded by the progressive income tax, better known as tax the rich, those who make over $200,000 per year. Of course, we cannot have guns and butter. So long as the military takes the money, we all lose. We should also have publicly financed feeder lines of vans and taxi cabs for areas that are not densely populated as well as in the downtown area for short runs. There used to be a jitney van line on Mission Street and that could be restored with public finances for areas where it is suited.

We hope our representative, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, can obtain funding for a Geary street car soon, as well as pay for everything else our bus and train system, the Municipal Railway, or MUNI, needs so we do not have to hear about fare increases or all other regressive means of minimally funding a mass transit system. MASS TRANSIT SHOULD BE FREE since the fares only minimally pay for it and are by definition a regressive tax on the workingclass, which in San Francisco mostly means tenants who are the least likely to have a car. We need to encourage more use of public transit and that can only be done by making it free of any fare. Our income taxes should cover all mass transit.