MUNI – 55-16th Street

A new Muni line to Unilocal?What could be better? OK, a faster, more streamlined 21-​Hayes route would be a start, but Muni’s last new line, the 5L-​Fulton Limited, is still a raging success more than a year later, so I’m all smiles and thumbs-​ups and LOLs and :-)s and, you know, like an introverted polar bear in the Fortress of Solitude.
I was waiting for the 22-​Fillmore last month, and the marquee was sporadically alerting us riders to the fact that there were no NextMUNI predictions for the 55 but that the line ran every 15 minutes. I thought, What the heck is the 55? And then an SFMTA employee/​volunteer walked up to me and handed me a flyer about the new 55−16^th Street. A new bus line on 16^th Street? One that would get me away from 16^th & Mission without having to cross the street and wait for a 33 and possibly miss the 22 I’m waiting for? (I often catch the 33-​Stanyan if the 22 will be a while, just to get away from that creepyish corner.)
I rode this line yesterday, and it’s magical. OK, maybe not quite, but it does feel like the 5L-​Fulton Limited all over again. Except that it makes all the stops the 22 does, so people aren’t complaining about missed stops. And the very best part is that as of now very few people are riding it all the way outbound, so instead of being cooped up with my fellow disgruntled Muniites, I had the bus all to myself from Kansas to Missouri. (Mad props to anyone who gets both references plus the 43 reference from a past Muni Unilocal review.) And I didn’t actually know which street it stopped at, but it was just the driver and I, so he helpfully filled me in on all the stops.
Now I don’t have to wait for the 22 at all. I can just catch whichever bus comes first. Yes, it means a little walk up Potrero Hill, but the exercise is good for me, as is not being annoyed by people, as is not spending a scintilla more of my life at 16^th & Mission than I absolutely need to.
The only bad new is that this new bus line is slated for closure. It’s actually just the future realignment of the 22-​Fillmore. The 22 will eventually run along 16^th Street all the way to the new UCSF hospitals in Mission Bay; it will no longer make all those gradual right turns into and up Potrero Hill. I have no idea whether it will eventually make it to Dogpatch, but even if it doesn’t, there’s the T-​Third. They opened the 55 now because it will take them a long time to extend the overhead wires for the 22 all the way to Mission Bay.
The bus I rode was one of the brand-​new ones, and it was clean! I still don’t know what those blue-​carpeted contraptions near the front are for, but I’m not complaining. No, not me. I’m an introverted polar bear, remember?