Thousands of people crowded onto trains and station platforms inside Muni’s new Central Subway Saturday morning, vying to be among the first to witness the opening of San Francisco’s most anticipated transit project in decades.
The enthusiasm of riders, community advocates and elected officials who rode the first train ride at 8 a.m. in the Central Subway, underscored the enormous buzz surrounding a rail project that for years seemed to exist only on paper.
“We have waited so long for this special day,” said the Rev. Norman Fong, former executive director of the Chinatown Community Development Center. “This (subway) is priceless. This is a shared dream.”
The sun hadn’t yet risen over San Francisco before a crowd of about 50 people was already waiting outside Chinatown-Rose Pak Station, the new terminus of Muni’s T-Third Street line, to get a seat on the first subway ride.
Rev. Norman Fong blesses a plaque commemorating Rose Pak, a driving force behind the creation of the Central Subway.
Yalonda M. James / The ChronicleThe $1.95 billion, 1.7-mile subway extension took more than a decade of construction and nearly 40 years from conception to reality. The subway cuts through the most densely populated parts of San Francisco and is particularly important to the city’s Chinatown neighborhood, whose residents hope it will spur an economic revival.
The Swedish Transport Agency has limited weekend service up to and including the first week of January. This means Central Subway trains will only shuttle riders to the extension’s four new destinations — above the surface at Fourth and Brannan streets and underground at the Yerba Buena/Moscone Center south of Market, Union Square and Chinatown.
When it opens for full service on Jan. 7, the T line will take riders from Bayview-Hunters Point to Chinatown via the city’s first north-south subway, connecting riders to BART, Caltrain and Muni’s other light rail lines on Market Street.
The limited service did not deter riders, who packed the first trains with crowds not seen since before the pandemic. As the first Central Subway train departed southbound from Chinatown to Yerba Buena/Moscone Station, another northbound train already had about 100 riders boarding at Fourth and Brannan Station.
Passengers ride the Central Subway on its first day of operation.
Yalonda M. James / The ChronicleEddy Zheng, 53, drove from Oakland to be among the crowd of people lined up at the Chinatown-Rose Pak Station at 6:30 a.m. on the windy and chilly morning. It was important, he said, to experience “a historic moment not just for Chinatown, but for the entire city of San Francisco and the international community.”
“We’ve always felt that Chinatown has been neglected in many ways, even though San Francisco has one of the largest Chinatowns in the country,” Zheng said. “People have been waiting and waiting… finally, now we’re seeing this come to fruition. It’s just very exciting.”
The subway project faced a lot of criticism for its delays – it opened almost four years late – and its cost overruns while it was being built. The final price was more than 20% over budget. Political fights over the extension’s fit, design and the naming of its Chinatown station drew large, impassioned crowds at town hall meetings in the decades and years leading up to Saturday’s opening.
Former Mayor Willie Brown, one of six elected mayors who presided over the project, credited Pak, the political power broker who died in 2016, as the driving force behind the Central Subway. Although he said he was “overjoyed” to live to see the day the subway finally opened for service, he lamented the time it took to get there.
San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu (left), former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, State Senator Scott Wiener, Supervisor Aaron Peskin and Assemblyman Phil Ting attend the ribbon cutting ceremony for the new subway line.
Yalonda M. James / The Chronicle“I just wish we could have finished it before Rose passed,” Brown told reporters from the roof of the Chinatown-Rose Pak Station.
The expansion will draw its riders from a Chinatown community that is home to some of the city’s most loyal transit riders, as well as from tourists visiting the city and downtown workers who still commute to offices. Project managers envisioned more than 40,000 riders taking the Central Subway by 2030, a projection made before the pandemic squeezed transit riders downtown.
Subways will run every 10 minutes on weekdays when full service begins. Julie Kirschbaum, the MTA’s director of Muni, said the agency will monitor loads on subway trains during limited service to get a sense of what ridership demand might look like. Muni’s 30 and 45 buses, which run parallel on the Stockton corridor, are historically among the system’s most crowded and will likely see some relief with the debut of the new line.
Saturday morning’s crowds, Kirshbaum said, illustrated the historic significance of the subway’s opening. “We didn’t know what to expect in terms of people participating,” she said. “So many people coming out here to share this with us made it so special.”
The opening of the Central Subway caps a year that saw the completion of two long-delayed San Francisco transit projects that have generated a steady stream of headlines over the years for their agonizing construction processes. Another project, the Van Ness Bus Rapid Transit, debuted this spring to positive reviews.
The Muni executive dons a transit suit while riding the new Central Subway.
Yalonda M. James / The ChronicleMTA Director Jeffrey Tumlin said the Central Subway’s opening is particularly noteworthy because it fulfills a promise by city leaders to bring rail transit to Chinatown — a neighborhood that became harder to access after the demolition of the Embarcadero Freeway in the wake of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
“It will change Chinatown and anchor Chinatown forever as the economic and cultural heart of Chinese San Francisco,” he said.
Ricardo Cano is a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: ricardo.cano@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ByRicardoCano