A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the 44 O’Shaughnessy

So I was on the way to the 44 O’Shaughnessy at 9th and Judah the other day to see if going to the “other” Safeway (i.e. not the Market St. one on the N-Judah line) would be faster than taking my door to door service from home to store.
When I got there a Muni Bus was parked, doors closed. And instead of having a route on its LED board up front, instead it simply read “Nowhere In Particular.” I couldn’t see if someone was in the driver’s seat or not.
I’d never seen such a thing before. But when I mentioned this to my friend “Mason Powell” (the nom de plum of my erstwhile deputy) he said that this is not unheard of, and the tradition started during the streetcar era (i.e. when streetcars went everywhere not just on the J, K, L, M, N and F lines).
Sure enough Google and Flickr, our two best friends, found this shot on Flickr of a bus just like the one I saw, and this reference to the classic streetcar signage of yesteryear.
Things like this make living here rather pleasant. I’ll leave the bashing of the city to the naysayers and the choose-up-siders from out of town and elsewhere. And, my bus did come on time….and the trip to Safeway was just fine.