Muni Playing Catch-Up with West Portal Fix-Up

If you took Coolidge Corner and moved it to San Francisco, you'd wind up with something very much like West Portal, a nicely-kept secret neighborhood with folksy shops and restaurants and a theater, about a 10-minute subway ride from the Castro. And get this: it's about to get even nicer, thanks to some sprucing-up by Muni.

"Underinvestment in the Muni system has brought us to a point where we cannot postpone this work," says Muni boss Nat Ford. Apparently, while they were replacing the decrepit wiring in the West Portal tunnel over the last few months, they noticed that the track bed was falling apart, too.

They've worked out an "accelerated schedule" to fix it -- about 2 months, during which times they'll be running shuttles at night from WP to Van Ness. It's a pretty good way of dealing with that chronic underinvestment that Nat Ford mentioned; the result of Muni spreading itself too thin, trying over the years to cover too many bases while suffering a shortage of money and competence.

Anyway, the work will make trips in the tunnel faster and less bumpy. They're also going to prune a bunch of trees, abate the pigeons, polish and pressure-wash, and do a bunch of nice landscaping. They're saying they might even get a birdbath. A BIRDBATH! Could this neighborhood get any more Norman Rockwell?