Something to Read During Your Long Long Bus Ride

There's no more dizzying story of SF history than that of our local transit. If you think it's hard to keep track of the bus routes today, just imagine trying to sort through the patchwork of agencies and name changes and battling operators that've spent the last hundred years keeping us from getting from one place to another. A bite-sized chunk of that history can be found in the new book The Key System: San Francisco and the Eastshore Empire, by transit historians Walter Rice and Emiliano Echeverria. Their blurb:

...the book tells the story of the Key Route’s transbay lines from the handsome 1903 wooden interurbans to the famous 1930s Bridge Units, the ornate Key
Route Pier, the ferryboat fleet, and lastly the Bridge Railway into downtown San Francisco. The Key System initially was part of businessman “Borax” Smith’s method to attract San Francisco workers to live in the cities of Berkeley, Oakland, and Piedmont, where he dealt in real estate. ... Key System’s bridge rail would be converted to bus (1958). Key itself would be taken over by AC Transit (1960).

The authors will be signing books on Saturday Sunday, May 20 in two locations: from noon to 3pm at the new Market Street Railway's San Francisco Railway Museum, behind Hotel Vitale at the Steuart Street F-line stop; and from 4pm to 6pm at Barnes & Noble at 2550 Taylor St.

The Cable Car Museum has added a layer of intrigue by refusing the carry any of the authors' books, including their book about cable cars. WTF? We'll explain more in part 2 of this feature tomorrow.