Climb halfway to the stars? Forget about it. San Francisco’s iconic cable cars haven’t gone anywhere for nearly a year. They’ve been shut down, put to sleep in their barn, since March 2020’s shelter-in-place order.
It might be a lot longer until we see them out there again. Those who tuned into this week’s San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency meeting heard top officials say that bringing them back would take resources away from other services, like those critical to get kids to school and help San Franciscans who live in hilly neighborhoods.
“We cannot do it all,” said SFMTA director of transportation Jeffrey Tumlin.
Under pressure from advocates, including business folks desperate to encourage tourism’s return, Tumlin and a key deputy declined to say when cable cars would reappear.
But they will. SFMTA can’t get rid of them, thanks to a 1940s vote that cemented their protection in the city charter, according to Michael Phipps, a board member of the Friends of the Cable Car Museum and co-author of Watermusic in the Track: A History of San Francisco Cable Cars.
Besides, it would take more than a pandemic to seal their fate. The cable cars have been around since 1873, surviving the 1906 earthquake and fire, the rise of the automobile, the rise and fall of private operators, and after World War II, a dastardly political campaign to rid the city of them completely. (“It was as dirty as anything since the Gilded Age,” says Phipps.)
Their existence might be protected, but their now-slumbering presence is a sliver of what it once was. Here’s how we arrived at this moment, with the city’s three remaining lines in temporary mothballs, waiting to ring their bells again.
The rise of The Octopus
From the 1870s to the 1890s, cable cars were ubiquitous, not just in San Francisco but everywhere. Peak cable car? That would be 1891.
The first existential threat came with electrification and a guy named Frank Sprague. In 1893, he invented an electric motor that turned cable cars into streetcars — cheaper, faster, and bigger.
No new cable car lines were built in San Francisco after 1891. The only problem (or saving grace) was the hills. The new streetcars couldn’t handle them, so cable cars remained important. But the new century was just around the corner.
In 1902, one of the several private operators, United Rail Roads (aka “The Octopus”), had monopoly ambitions to rule all SF transit. It bought up most of the competition and wanted to replace the remaining cable cars with streetcars. They weren’t entirely successful because citizens (especially some powerful ones, like Adolph Sutro, according to Phipps) didn’t want overhead wires on the streets.
Then came April 18, 1906. The earthquake and subsequent fire wiped out nearly all transit, along with the city proper. Powerhouses, where giant wheels keep the miles-long steel cables in motion, burned to the ground, as did many of the cars. Lines to Golden Gate Park and on Valencia Street disappeared, never to return. But a few lines outside the fire zone were spared, and a few were rebuilt — again, because their routes were still impassable for electric streetcars.
The system stayed more or less intact for decades under United Rail Roads and one other private operator.
After World War II, America wanted efficiency. It wanted modernity. It wanted vehicles with rubber tires and gas tanks. SF Mayor Roger Lapham, fresh from nearly being recalled in 1946 for his plan to raise streetcar fares, next decided to replace the remaining cable cars and streetcars with buses. In 1947, the plan blew up in his face, and Friedel Klussmann was the dynamite.
Starting with womens’ civic groups, she rallied the city with her Citizens’ Committee to Save the Cable Cars, and some well-heeled friends joined along for the ride. Nothing terrified politicians more than “a delegation of women marching up the steps of City Hall,” Klussmann said later, according to a history Phipps published in 2013.
As the public and the newspapers turned against him, the mayor steadily lost important allies, such as the visitors and convention bureau. Klussmann’s side placed a measure on the November ballot to protect cable cars in the city charter. It passed 170,000 to 50,000. It was the start of a larger movement called San Francisco Beautiful that exists to this day. (The cable car turnaround near Aquatic Park is named in Klussmann’s honor.)
Mayor Lapham wasn’t up for reelection, but Elmer Robinson won the 1947 race by ringing as many cable car bells as possible (in the presence of news photographers, it goes without saying).
There was a catch. The charter amendment only protected the line that the city owned: the Powell-Mason line, which runs from Market to Bay and Taylor streets. The other remaining lines were privately owned by the California Street Cable Railroad Co. In 1951, “Cal Cable” gave up the ghost after losing its Lloyd’s of London insurance due to an accident. The city bought the company on the cheap, but with little appetite to run the lines.
More machinations
The “cable car wars” were not over. Looking back, they showed “how the cultural politics of transit modernization in postwar San Francisco was refracted through competing visions of the gender of modernity.”
Put another way, political machinations continued. Citing chronic budget deficits, officials proposed a 1954 ballot measure to “save” the cable cars (and save money), but Phipps notes that it was awash with disinformation to confuse voters. If it passed, SF’s system would actually be cut about in half. It would preserve the Powell-Mason lines but shorten the California line to end at Van Ness instead of Presidio, and severely truncate two others to create what is now the Powell-Hyde line.
It squeaked through. Court appeals didn’t work. The old Washington-Jackson line, which ran through Pacific Heights, and the O’Farrell-Jones-Hyde line, which served the Tenderloin, shut down, and a car barn was dismantled at California and Hyde. (It’s now a Trader Joe’s.)
Frieda Klussmann stayed vigilant, beating back an attempt in the early 1970s to replace weekend and holiday cable car service with buses.
And that’s where we stand today. And tomorrow and for months more, likely to stretch longer than the other long hiatus for the cable cars, in 1982, when they were taken offline for an 18-month overhaul.
Their return, hopefully well before their 150th anniversary in 2023, will probably hinge on two big considerations: safety for operators and passengers, as well as economics. If tourists don’t return, there will be few riders to pay the premium. (It was $8 a ride before the pandemic.)
Then again, what better way for San Franciscans to celebrate a new era than with something they may have never done before — a cable car ride?
