The Central Subway is coming to North Beach.
There just won't be a stop or a station there.
The tourist landmark in San Francisco's northeastern corner will suffer some construction-related headaches over the next two years, when the drilling equipment that will dig the 1.8-mile tunnel from Caltrain to Chinatown exits the ground near Washington Square Park. So it's very true that the Central Subway is coming to North Beach -- it's coming up and out of the ground in North Beach, where traffic will have to be rerouted during construction.
Subway opponents say a flyer handed out at the North Beach Festival painted a misleading picture. "The Central Subway is Coming to North Beach!" was the headline on flyers handed out to festival-goers at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency's booth, according to the San Francisco Appeal online newspaper.
The flyers had a map of the subway with a Washington Square stop attached to the end of the line. The flyers were produced by the planning nonprofit SPUR, San Francisco Planning and Urban Research. The flyers asked citizens to petition the SFMTA to add a Washington Square stop to the end of the line, to give the neigborhood some benefit for the construction mess.
SPUR plans to fund a study examining adding a Washington Square and a Fisherman's Wharf stop to the Central Subway, the newspaper reported.
SPUR said the flyer was clear that there was no subway coming, just construction headaches. But Jon Golinger, head of the Telegraph Hill Dwellers neighborhood group and a subway opponent, said that the flyer was misleading.
