Balboa Park station is a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station and Muni Metro complex in the Mission Terrace neighborhood of San Francisco, California, located near the eponymous Balboa Park. It is an intermodal hub served by four BART routes, three Muni Metro lines, and a number of Muni bus routes. The station complex also includes two rail yards, Cameron Beach Yard and Green Light Rail Center, where Muni maintains Muni Metro trains and heritage streetcars. BART uses a below-grade island platform on the west side of the complex; Muni Metro routes use several smaller side platforms located on surface-level rail loops around the yards.
The San Francisco and San Jose Railroad opened in 1863, with Elkton station located near the modern site. Passenger service on the line (later the Southern Pacific Railroad Ocean View Branch) ran until about 1922. Electric streetcar service at Balboa Park began in 1892 with the San Francisco and San Mateo Electric Railway, which built a still-standing office building designed by Reid & Reid there in 1901. The United Railroads conglomerate built its Elkton shops on an adjacent parcel in 1907. In the 1960s, BART decided to use the Ocean View Branch right-of-way for part of a rapid transit system. The San Francisco portion of BART, including Balboa Park station, opened on November 5, 1973.
Both streetcar facilities were replaced by modern yards in the 1970s and 1980s. Muni Metro service to the Balboa Park complex began with the K Ingleside line in 1979, followed by the M Ocean View line in 1980 and the J Church line in 1991. In the early 2000s, BART and Muni began planning renovations to improve the accessibility of the station and its connections to the surrounding neighborhoods. A new BART entrance was completed in 2011, followed by new Muni platforms in 2015 and 2017 and an additional footbridge in 2018. Additional improvements like more elevators and modernized headhouses are proposed. The 1901-built office building and an adjacent powerhouse, were abandoned after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. They were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2010; a renovation of the powerhouse for community use was completed in 2020, while a renovation of the office building is planned but unfunded.
Station layout and services
The Balboa Park station complex is centered around an irregular quadrilateral bounded by Ocean Avenue to the north, the Interstate 280 (I-280) cut to the west, Geneva Avenue to the south, and San Jose Avenue to the east. The BART platform—a island platform—is located below grade on the west side of the complex. It stretches from Ocean Avenue to slightly south of Geneva Avenue. The northern third of the platform, plus a small section at the southern end, is in an open trench; the remainder is under Geneva Avenue and the headhouse structure. The main entrance, located on the north side of Geneva Avenue, leads to a below-street-level fare control area in a mezzanine over the middle of the BART platform. Additional entrances from the south side of Geneva Avenue (via an underpass) and from San Jose Avenue at Geneva Avenue (the Muni entrance) also lead to the fare control area. From the two paid areas in the mezzanine, stairs and escalators connect to the platform. An accessible ramp from Ocean Avenue runs along the west side of the station to a secondary fare control area at the north end of the north paid area. An elevator on the north side of Geneva Avenue connects to the south paid area and the platform.
A Muni Metro rail yard, the Curtis E. Green Light Rail Center, takes up the rest of the block. The east half is occupied by a maintenance building and the west half by open storage tracks, with an administrative building at the south end. Muni J Church and K Ingleside trains loop around the outer edge of the yard. Trains enter from Ocean Avenue and drop off passengers at a high-level platform (which is connected to the BART fare mezzanine and the path top San Jose Avenue with a ramp) on the west side of the yard. They lay over on a pair of tracks on the south side of the yard, then pick up passengers at a high-level platform on the east side of the yard adjacent to San Jose Avenue. J Church trains exit the yard there onto tracks on San Jose Avenue (with a separate stop at Ocean Avenue), while K Ingleside trains continue around the loop and exit where they entered.
A second Muni rail yard, the Cameron Beach Yard, is located south of Geneva Avenue and east of San Jose Avenue. It includes a maintenance building, a storage shelter for historic streetcars, open storage tracks, and a currently-abandoned office building and powerhouse. M Ocean View trains loop around Cameron Beach Yard; the last stop for outbound trains is at San Jose and Niagara, one block to the south of Geneva Avenue. The stop does not have a platform; if a passenger needs an accessible platform to alight, the train will proceed across Geneva Avenue to a mini-high platform located at Seneca Avenue. Inbound trains pick up passengers at San Jose and Geneva, which has a concrete platform with a wayside lift for accessibility, after proceeding around the yard loop. A housing development is located on the west side of San Jose Avenue on a parcel that formerly housed storage tracks called the Upper Yard.
Balboa Park is a major transfer point for Muni buses, with over 13,000 daily boardings by a 2008 survey. Routes , , , , , , and stop on Geneva Avenue next to the BART station entrances. Routes and stop on Ocean Avenue at I-280 and at San Jose Avenue. Routes 714 and stop on San Jose Avenue. The Commute.org Brisbane-Crocker Park Shuttle and the SamTrans Daly City Bayshore Shuttle also stop on Geneva Avenue.
History Southern Pacific Railroad
The San Francisco and San Jose Railroad (SF&SJ) opened through San Francisco on October 16, 1863, and was merged into the Southern Pacific Railroad (SP) in 1868. The line had several stops within San Francisco, including Elkton, located on the east side of the tracks south of Ocean Avenue. It was primarily a freight station for nearby farms, though it also served the nearby Industrial School as well as residential neighborhoods that were laid out in the 1860s. However, the railroad was not very useful to local residents: high fares discouraged both passengers and freight, and on-street running in the Mission District made the ride slow. After the SP opened the faster Bayshore Cutoff in 1907, the original mainline through San Francisco was reduced to a minor freight branch (the Ocean View Branch) with minimal passenger service.
SP passenger service on the Ocean View Branch was limited to a few daily locals after 1907, and just one daily round trip after June 1919. The SP was allowed to temporarily discontinue passenger service on the branch in November 1928 during a construction project. This became permanent in March 1930; freight service on the line continued. The tracks were abandoned north of Ocean Avenue (up to 23rd Street) on August 10, 1942, and south of Ocean Avenue (to Daly City) after a 1956 excursion train. The Southern Freeway was constructed partially on the abandoned right-of-way in the 1960s; the section through Balboa Park was completed in 1964. As part of the highway, pedestrian ramps were built at Ocean Avenue to allow passengers on highway express buses to transfer to local transit.
Streetcars Electric streetcar service began with the San Francisco and San Mateo Electric Railway (SF&SM) on San Jose Avenue on April 27, 1892. It was followed in December 1895 by a Market Street Railway spur on Ocean Avenue, branching off their Mission Street line. In 1900, the SF&SM bought land on the southeast corner of San Jose Avenue and Geneva Avenue to construct its main facilities. Construction began on July 14, 1900. An office building along San Jose Avenue—designed by Reid & Reid—opened on April 22, 1901, followed by an adjacent powerhouse in 1903. The SF&SM and the Market Street Railway were both absorbed into the United Railroads (URR) conglomerate in 1902. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the URR rerouted the San Mateo line to Mission Street; Embarcadero–Daly City route 26 continued to operate on San Jose Avenue.
In 1907, while expanding its streetcar network after the earthquake, the URR hurriedly opened its Elkton shops next to the SP's Elkton station. The shops occupied a parcel bounded by San Jose Avenue to the east, the SP line to the west, Ocean Avenue to the north, and Geneva Avenue to the south. The SP line was used to deliver materials to the yard. On September 16, 1909, the SF&SM yard was renamed Geneva Yard. The powerhouse, damaged in the earthquake, was rebuilt in 1910. In 1917, during a violent strike of URR operators, strike-brakers were temporarily housed in the office building. A wooden staircase was constructed from the second floor directly to the carbarn.
The URR was renamed as the Market Street Railway in 1921, and purchased by the city-owned San Francisco Municipal Railway (Muni) in 1944. The merger and the impending end of World War II (which had limited the availability of rubber tires) prompted the conversion of many streetcar routes to bus or trolleybus. Route 26 had previously been discontinued in 1938 and soon replaced by a branch (itself closed on November 5, 1939) of the route 9 streetcar. Route 26 service resumed on September 23, 1944, but was replaced by buses on February 4, 1945, ending streetcar service on San Jose Avenue. Muni's K Ingleside line was extended on Ocean Avenue and Onondaga Street to Mission Street on April 8, 1945, as the ex-MSR line on Ocean Avenue was converted to bus. K Ingleside service was cut back to Phelan Loop on October 10, 1952; however, Geneva Yard was retained as the yard for the remaining streetcar system. The southern portion of the Elkton lot, as well as the parcel across Geneva Avenue to the south, were used for bus storage.
BART station
Even before the Ocean View Branch was abandoned, several proposals for rapid transit aimed to use the Ocean View Branch route (usually in conjunction with a Mission Street subway) and its Bernal Cut to avoid expensive tunneling through San Francisco's hills. Early plans for BART around 1960 considered several different routings for the Peninsula Line (then planned to extend to Palo Alto): the Bayshore Cutoff, the existing Twin Peaks Tunnel, a new bored tunnel crossing diagonally under the Mission District, and a Mission Street tunnel continuing via Alemany Boulevard. By 1961, the Mission Street tunnel and reuse of the Ocean View Branch was favored, with a station at Ocean Avenue. The plan was approved by voters in 1962.
Early BART plans referred to many stations by the cross street, but most stations were ultimately named for the surrounding neighborhood or city. The BART Board approved the name "Balboa Park" (after the nearby municipal park) for the station at Ocean Avenue in December 1965. The station was sandwiched between I-280 and Elkton shops, a sliver of which was taken for construction. Construction of the station was 60% complete by mid-1970, with work expected to be finished the next year. The San Francisco portion of BART, including Balboa Park station, opened on November 5, 1973.