1906, Newspaper Row at Third, Kearny, and Market—this Haight Street cable car runs inbound on Market Street from Stanyan to the Ferries...the exact route that Muni's 7-Haight bus runs a century later!

Though many inventors had earlier patented different components of systems that could haul vehicles using a wire rope pulled by a stationary steam engine, Hallidie was the first to put it all together, opening the first passenger cable car line in the world on Clay Street in San Francisco in 1873.

Short-lived revolution
The technology revolutionized urban transit—briefly. Far faster than horsecars, cable cars soon appeared in dozens of cities around the world, including London, Paris, Sydney, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Oakland. By the early 1890s, San Francisco boasted more than twenty cable car lines, including the California Street line (opened 1878), the Powell-Mason line (1888), a line on Hyde Street (1891), and five lines on Market Street.

But the cable car’s heyday was short-lived. In 1888, Frank Sprague opened the first practical electric streetcar line in Richmond, Virginia. Instead of using a stationery steam engine to pull an underground cable, with cars mechanically attached to the cable, Sprague realized it would be more efficient to use overhead wires to carry electricity through a trolley pole to motors aboard each car. Streetcars were significantly faster than cable cars, the lines were cheaper to build, and the cars were more easily operated independently of one another. By the turn of the 20th Century, streetcars (also known as trolleys) had replaced cable cars in most cities. (San Francisco became the last city in the Americas to operate cable cars when Seattle closed its last line in 1940. When Dunedin, New Zealand, shut down its final line in 1957, San Francisco’s cable cars became unique in the world—again.)

San Francisco had only converted a minority of its cable car lines to streetcars by April 1906. The United Railroads, which had gobbled up most San Francisco transit lines in the preceding few years, wanted to change over its heavily-used Market Street cable lines (which boasted some of the largest cable cars ever built) to electric streetcar service, but the City’s Board of Supervisors balked, objecting to the overhead wires it entailed.

The Sacramento-Clay cable car line terminated across from the Ferry Building. Here, a cable car turns onto the wide open Embarcadero, after traversing the Produce District, in 1940.

Earthquakes and bribes
Nature stepped in. On April 18, 1906, a cataclysmic earthquake and fire devastated much of San Francisco and its existing cable car system. The United Railroad magnates jumped in and installed 'emergency' streetcar service by stringing overhead wire over the Market Street cable car tracks, later making it permanent by the expedient measure of bribing the entire board.

After that, cable car service in San Francisco continued its decline. The Geary cable line was purchased by the City itself and converted to America’s first municipally-operated big city streetcar line in 1912. (This was the beginning of the San Francisco Municipal Railway—Muni.) The Pacific Avenue line disappeared in 1929, and the Castro cable line in 1941. The Sacramento-Clay line, successor to Hallidie’s original line on Clay Street, gave way to buses in 1942.

In fact, buses were replacing streetcars in many cities by that time as well. As World War II ended, many elected officials thought rail transit was old-fashioned, and the worn-out tracks and cars too expensive to renew. San Francisco was no exception.

'Progress' rejected
In 1947, 'progress' threatened to wipe out San Francisco’s cable cars. The mayor, Roger Lapham, wanted to scrap the Powell Street lines, now owned by the City, and substitute hill-climbing buses instead. But outraged citizens rallied to the cry of preservationist Friedel Klussmann, who commandeered the public stage and, with no prior political experience, created a grassroots campaign to save the cable cars. Lapham’s plan was crushed by voters at the ballot box, and he himself is generally thought to have lost his job over the issue.

But the threats to the cable cars were not over. While the City itself, through Muni, was now operating the two Powell lines, the other three surviving lines, California Street, O’Farrell, Jones & Hyde, and a short shuttle on lower Jones Street, were still operated by the private company that built them many decades before, the California Street Cable Railroad Company. And 'Cal Cable,' as it was usually known, was going broke. Fares were regulated by the City, Muni competed with the flagship California line with buses a block away, and the company’s physical plant (powerhouse, carbarn, and track) was worn out. Unhappy gripmen and conductors—paid less than their Muni counterparts—exacerbated the situation.

After one failed attempt by the City to get voters approval for a bond issue to buy Cal Cable, the company shut down and declared bankruptcy in July, 1951 when its insurance was cancelled. After several weeks of intense negotiations, the City and County purchased the assets of Cal Cable, and Muni began operating Cal Cable’s three lines in January, 1952.

A very early version of the cable car, operated by the Clay Street Hill Railroad Company.

Cutbacks and consolidation
Within two years, though, Muni’s leaders were saying it was too expensive to operate two separate cable car systems. Several different consolidation plans were proposed, including cutting off the outer end of the California line (which at the time was twice as long as today’s line, extending all the way to Presidio Avenue in Laurel Heights), and the inner end of the O’Farrell, Jones & Hyde line, creating a new, tourist-oriented California-Hyde line between the Ferry Building area and Aquatic Park.

After lots of political machinations, a different plan emerged, which combined the inner end of the Washington-Jackson line with the outer end of the Hyde line. This plan ultimately prevailed, though cable car supporters claimed that violations of the City Charter and other procedures had been committed. The reality, though, was that by late 1957, the cable car system took on the route structure it has retained ever since.

Since then, cable car service has been threatened twice. In 1971, a budget crunch led Muni to propose replacing cable cars on the more lightly-traveled California line with buses nights and weekends. Voters responded by writing minimum cable car service levels into the City Charter, and prohibiting what some fans call “bustitution” except when the cable system breaks down.

Break down it did in the early 1980s. More precisely, it wore out. Tracks began to fail, the winding machinery and motors were faltering. Faced with the potential of catastrophic accidents, the City decided to rebuild the entire system, which it did between 1982 and 1984, with a mix of public and private funding. (The shutdown of the cable car system was the impetus for the first Historic Trolley Festival, which in turn spurred the F-line.)

The present-day three-line cable car system is now the only cable-and-grip cable car system operating anywhere in the world. Long ago, electricity supplanted steam to provide the power that pulls the cable, and as mentioned, the system’s tracks, cable channels, and powerhouse were completely renewed in the 1980s, but essentially the system operates just as it always has.

And it’s the only one left.