The return of San Francisco’s cable cars offers much needed solace
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As California Street meets Van Ness Avenue, a little girl peers up the hill at the cable car headed in our direction. “It’s slower than a snail!” she yells.
That’s unfair. No snail I’m aware of has a top speed of nine and a half miles per hour. Riding San Francisco’s cable cars is a joy that until August had been out of bounds since March 2020 when they were taken off the streets as coronavirus set in. It was the longest break in service since 1982, when the system was halted for rebuilding, following decades of penny-pinching.
The first time people rode on these cars — the oldest system in the world — was in 1873. Since then, I can tell you with great confidence that everyone who has ridden a San Francisco cable car has fallen in love.
Me? I’m head over heels. My daily commute on the California line takes me from gritty Polk Street and up past the beautiful Fairmont hotel. A statue of Tony Bennett stands on its front lawn, arms outstretched in deliverance of the climactic note of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco”. It was here in 1961 that he first performed the song, paying tribute to the “little cable cars” that “climb halfway to the stars”.
The cars are particularly charming right now — they’re currently free to ride rather than costing $8 one-way, a fare that is set to increase. City transport officials have previously warned that the cable cars are a luxury San Francisco can’t afford if it’s to also run buses, trams and trains in a post-pandemic world.
So the return of the cable cars immediately became a symbol of a city slowly getting back on its feet, as evidenced by locals whooping in approval as they go by. “You’re back! So good to see you!” a woman says.
Tom Leal, a born-and-bred San Franciscan who has operated a cable car for 18 years, tells me it’s not uncommon for people to break into applause. “I hear it every single day,” he says. “It’s a relief that things are getting back to normal.”
But are they? The answer shifts as the cable car’s routes force you to see all sides of the city.
In Chinatown — the oldest such quarter in North America — visitor numbers have plummeted, with a worry that bigotry will make this area slower to recover. Many of the buildings bear the words “Stop Asian Hate”.
Things are quieter still in the city’s financial district, where the growing buzz from earlier this year has subsided. The Financial Times has returned to its Montgomery Street office, but the likes of Uber, Google and Facebook have pushed return-to-work plans into 2022. Just 19 per cent of workers are back in San Francisco offices, according to security firm Kastle Systems.
The Powell-Hyde line, popular with tourists, sees shoppers queue up outside Gucci on Union Square, surrounded by growing signs of the human desperation of drug addiction and homelessness, and delivers a hard jolt to the conscience.
At the other end are the barking sea lions, clam chowder and street performers of Fisherman’s Wharf, where the once-teeming tourist trap now manages a murmur. Hotel occupancy has been rising, but many waterfront restaurants remain boarded up. The throngs of cyclists heading towards the Golden Gate Bridge have dwindled.
But the cable car endures, as it has always done. Through earthquakes, a huge fire, political pressure, and now, one hopes, a pandemic. At the Friedel Klussmann turnaround, where the cars are reorientated to go back the other way, a steady line of people wait to hop on.
“It’s a monument,” says Tom Lauzze, in town to escape wildfire smoke in other parts of the state. With him is Amy Sell, who once lived in San Francisco and misses it deeply. “This is my favourite city in the world. It just has that . . . European feel.”
That’s a common way of describing the place. The least American of all of America’s cities — a compliment or a put down depending on who says it. For residents, San Francisco’s historic embrace of all-comers, regardless of colour, status or sexual orientation, remains a point of pride.
A lot of hearts have been left here lately, though. The exodus prompted by Covid poses a deeper threat, perhaps, than anything that has come before. But on the cable car, at least, it’s easy to forget anything is amiss.
