The State - News from Dec. 29, 1987

Seventy-five years after Mayor Sunny Jim Rolph plunked down a newly minted nickel in the fare box of Car No. 1, San Francisco marked the anniversary of America’s first publicly owned transit system--the Municipal Railway. Stepping onto the same streetcar that carried Rolph, Mayor Dianne Feinstein led a balloon-festooned parade of trolleys and buses over rain-slick streets east on Market Street to Powell. There, it met another locally famous trolley, a former Moscow streetcar donated by the U.S.S.R. Nicknamed “The Muni,” the streetcar-bus-cable-car system now totals 601 miles, and the city boasts that 95% of its citizens live within three blocks of a transit stop.