San Fran Voice trolls the world of the web to find videos that are about SF or come from SF. Posted here every morning, check the archives for the old ones.
Explanation: Today’s SF YouTube Pick is of the Sunday Riders motorcycle club … that’s what they do.
San Fran Voice is all about finding great things in this city from great venues for live music to lessons in love learned from the streets of San Francisco. One of the daily finds in the Bay Area is entertainment. There’s simply no shortage of art, oddities and experiences in San Francisco. To reflect that, San Fran Voice has a daily YouTube pick which shows off someone or something related to San Francisco.
Today’s YouTube pick is … all about alternative transportation options in San Francisco.
We’ve got the motorized beer cooler:
We’ve got the modern chair: And of course we have the annual Big Wheel races:
If you’ve ever taken a bus in San Francisco (and if you live here, you probably have) then you know that you’re supposed to get on the bus at the front door so you can pay your fare. You also know that if everyone did that during every trip, the buses would never get anywhere on time. This totally amusing video looks at “fare evaders” on the San Francisco MUNI system. Gotta love it. My favorite part is the one who ignores a ticket being given to him and gets away, proving my theory that if you act like you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing, most people aren’t going to question you.
Growing up is all about taking what you learn from one part of your life and using to better understand yourself so that you stop making mistakes in other areas of your life. You learn tough lessons from your experiences and you do better the next time and that’s how you become the adult that you are. San Fran Voice thinks that there are tons of different things to do in this city that all teach you something about the world in general and yourself individually. And what you learn in this city can be applied to your love life if you look hard enough at how. Today’s lesson in San Francisco love comes from the world of San Francisco transportation. That lesson is:
Enjoy every moment; it’s all in the journey.
See, transportation in San Francisco is an interesting thing. In comparison with other cities, I think that San Francisco transportation is awesome. I can step outside my North Beach apartment and walk just a few steps to a bus or cable car. I can hail a taxi, make a quick trip to the pier to get a ferry or head not too far at all to jump on BART. Without too much effort, I can get to trains, rent (or share) cars, find a rideshare ride, or make it to the airport. But the flipside of this is that it sometimes gets hard not to expect public transportation here to be easy.
What I mean is, San Francisco is so used to great public transportation that when something causes a hold up – the N Judah line gets stuck on the tracks or the cable cars need maintenance and switch to shuttles or you get the ride share ride but can’t for the life of you find a parking spot – we can get impatient. But if you stop to look around at the people who are by you as you’re making your way through the city, you really see that the fact that people from all walks of life are using the public transportation here makes it possible to have interesting experiences every single time that you step outside to go somewhere. Sure, when I try to go somewhere and the process is slow, it’s frustrating. But I always get to where I wanted to eventually and often the best experiences of the night are those noted as I was trying to get there.
Love, of course, is the same way. In a way, many people expect – or at least want – love to be easy. And dating can be easy here because there are so many single folks looking for the same things that you are (more or less). But if you have a goal in mind at the end, you can really get distracted from what’s developing in front of you. If you’re whole plan is for marriage … or in this city, for a certain kind of one night stand act … you might get to where you’re going eventually. But if you can keep your heart open to the experiences happening while you’re trying to get there, you might find that those are the ones you’ve enjoyed the most.
If asked to name the main street in San Francisco, a number of people would offer the automatic reply that it’s Market Street. This isn’t entirely true but that’s only because San Francisco is a city filled with such distinct neighborhoods that there are multiple “main streets” in different sections of town. Insofar as there can be a street that everyone kind of ends up at on a regular basis, Market Street is that street.
That Market is a main street is due in large part to the fact that it is the hub of much of the city’s transportation. The BART trains and the MUNI lines which run underground are most easily accessible by heading to Market Street and picking one of the stations which are really only blocks apart. The city’s famous F-line runs along Market Street. The cable cars make their turnaround at the intersection of Market Street and Powell Street. Numerous buses that lead towards all different areas of the city make stops along Market. And taxis are easy to grab here. And depending on where you’re coming from, if you’re planning to leave the city, you usually end up taking Market or crossing Market to get there. It is the main vein that runs through the city in terms of transportation.
But Market Street is a street with many different personalities. It passes through so much of the city, through so many different neighborhoods, that it is home to the craziest of characters, the most famous of local government officials and the plain janes that are taking care of their daily business. Starting not too far from the Ferry Building on the bay, Market Street passes through the towering buildings of the Financial District and wends its way through a great deal of shopping. You’ll pass some big stores including Old Navy and Ross, the multi-level Virgin Records, the name-brand bigger boutiques, and the Apple computer store which has the glass-like staircase and people parked at every gadget for trials.
Moving further towards the Pacific Ocean, Market Street will take you up towards the Civic Center, which is San Francisco’s government hub. You’ll move past famous theaters and in to an area where strip clubs advertise “touch the magic” and porn stores flank cheap bars. Then you’ll move into a more neighborhood-feel kind of place where there are piano karaoke lounges (Martuni’s for example) and local record stores. In the mid-Market area, you come across a budding artsy neighborhood which is currently being called “The Deco Ghetto”. Moving up in to Upper Market, you start to get into more of a Castro feel for life. After Market hits Castro, it begins to become a winding road and eventually turns into Portola, taking you through residential parts of the city that you’d rarely visit as a tourist.
Just with this quick drive along Market Street to this area, you’ve seen the edges of a number of the places which make up San Francisco as a city. It may not be a “main street” in the traditional sense of the word, but Market Street is the portal to a number of San Francisco neighborhoods and the one street you need to know if you’re going to be trying to get around the city without a car.
Zipcar is a San Francisco car sharing program which allows carless SF residents to have access to cars when they need them and helps raise awareness about environmental issues in the city. This beautiful, artsy video is one person’s Zipcar trek set to super fun music.
Described in the video as “a soldier of little fortune whose real wealth is measured in spirit”, The Bike Messenger weaves in and out of San Francisco traffic. To give props where they’re due, the clip first aired on kron tv in 1992 and is apparently on YouTube courtesy of our own Exploratorium.
Today’s YouTube SF pick is a clip from Critical Mass. Although it’s now spread around the world, Critical Mass started here in San Francisco back in 1992. The controlled-chaos event spreads the word about environmental issues and social justice causes, although it’s also just kind of fun to see bicyclists shut down the city streets.
Today’s San Francisco YouTube pick is only eight seconds long, but if you ever wondered how someone might entertain himself and others during a ride on the BART to get somewhere in the city, this clip gives you a peek. Weird!
San Fran Voice loves to bring you the best of the strange YouTube footage out there that relates to San Francisco. I’m not sure that I can even tell you what today’s minute-and-a-half-long pick is about, but it includes SF’s MUNI transportation, a red herring character and b&w footage. Works for me.
