San Francisco's Municipal Railway (MUNI)

Muni was born from the wreckage of the 1906 earthquake, when San Francisco was still served by a patchwork of commercial horsecar, cable car, and electric streetcar companies. Voters approved a municipal rail line on Geary in 1909, and in 1912 the city converted Geary Street into its first municipally operated electric streetcar route. An ambitious building program followed — the Stockton Street Tunnel opened in 1914, the Twin Peaks Tunnel in 1918, and the Sunset Tunnel in 1928 — putting Muni in head-to-head competition with the United Railroads' successor down Market Street, where the two systems' parallel tracks earned the nickname "roar of the four." Muni absorbed its private rival, the Market Street Railway Company, in 1944. The city's first publicly owned cable car line dates to 1906, and the surviving cable network — reorganized into its present shape in 1952 — was named a National Historic Landmark in 1964. The 1983 San Francisco Historic Trolley Festival, conceived as a stand-in attraction while the cable cars underwent rebuilding, proved so popular that it led to the permanent F line heritage streetcar service in 1995. In 1999, Muni merged with two other agencies to form the SFMTA.