If not for the broken Bay Bridge, it would have been the biggest transportation story of the day: the reaction to Mayor Newsom’s musings about eventually removing all Muni service, including the F-line, from Market Street. The chatter started in Blogsville the moment the Mayor appeared looking pensive on the front page of the Examiner yesterday.
Birmingham Electric No. 1077 followed by San Diego No. 1078 at Fisherman’s Wharf. Kevin Sheridan photo.
The Blue Angels, courtesy U.S. Navy.
PCC streetcars pass reach other on Market Street
Jamison Wieser photo.
While National Park lands are a major destination of the planned streetcar extension to Fort Mason, connecting western Fisherman’s Wharf to regional transit and the rest of the waterfront is a big benefit as well. Market Street Railway illustration, Robert Campbell photo.
Maybe. For the first time, Muni staff is officially raising the prospect of a different F‑line fare with its governing board.
In 1901, the poet Gelett Burgess penned a poem that celebrated a cable car ride. Specifically, The Ballad of the Hyde Street Grip chronicled the feeling of riding what was then San Francisco’s newest cable car line, the O’Farrell, Jones & Hyde line, which had opened ten years before. The rule of that day was that any new cable car line was ‘inferior’ at the crossings to older lines, meaning that a gripman on the new line had to drop the cable at every crossing of an older line to keep the grip from slicing through the older line’s ‘superior’ cable, which crossed above the new line’s cable. Since the O’Farrell, Jones & Hyde line was the newest line of all, its gripmen had to drop the cable 22 times on every roundtrip, which is why Burgess wrote, “You are apt to earn your wages, on the Hyde Street Grip.”
