The cable cars are not an attraction bolted onto the city. They are the surviving fragment of a public transport network, they are still run by the municipal transit agency as ordinary service, and they are the last manually operated cable railway working anywhere in the world.
Three lines remain. One of them is far better than the other two and almost nobody queues for it, which is the single most useful thing on this subject.
There is no engine on the car. A steel cable runs continuously in a slot beneath the street at a constant 9.5 miles an hour, or 15.3 kilometres an hour — and that is therefore the system's top speed, because a car can never travel faster than the cable it is holding. The gripman closes a grip down through the slot onto the moving cable to go, and releases it and applies the brakes to stop. Going downhill the grip is released altogether and the car is held on brakes alone, which is worth thinking about on Hyde Street.
Every cable in the city is driven from one powerhouse, and this is why the Cable Car Museum repays half an hour. It is inside the working car barn at Washington and Mason, and from a gallery visitors look down on the enormous winding wheels hauling the cables under the streets outside. It is free to enter and it is not really a museum — it is the machine room.
Each car carries a gripman and a conductor. The Powell Street cars take sixty people, twenty-nine of them seated, and because they run in one direction only they have to be physically turned on a turntable at each end.
Andrew Smith Hallidie proposed the system in 1869, and the Clay Street Hill Railroad made its first run on 2 August 1873.
The tale repeated everywhere is that Hallidie was moved to invent it after watching a horse-drawn streetcar slide backwards down a wet hill, dragging the team to their deaths. It is a good story and it may be true, but it is not confirmed, and accounts differ even on Hallidie's precise role and the exact date of that first run. It is best treated as a founding legend rather than a fact.
The city once had many miles of cable railway. Electric streetcars made most of it obsolete and the 1906 earthquake finished the job.
In 1947 Mayor Roger Lapham proposed shutting the two city-owned Powell Street lines as obsolete and uneconomic. Twenty-seven women's civic organisations met jointly, formed the Citizens' Committee to Save the Cable Cars under Friedel Klussmann, and forced the question to a referendum. The lines were kept by 166,989 votes to 51,457 — better than three to one. Every subsequent attempt to close them has failed for the same reason.
The system was designated a National Historic Landmark on 29 January 1964. It is frequently described as the only moving National Historic Landmark in the United States, which is not quite right: the St Charles streetcar line in New Orleans holds the same designation.
It shut completely in 1982 for a total rebuild — sixty-nine blocks of track and cable channel, the car barn, the powerhouse and thirty-seven cars — and reopened on 21 June 1984. It stopped again in March 2020, with limited service returning on 2 August 2021 and full service on 4 September 2021.
The mistake is to join the queue at the Powell and Market turnaround, which in summer can run to an hour or more in the middle of the day while a crowd watches the cars being spun round by hand.
The alternatives, in order of usefulness: take the California Street line instead; walk three or four blocks up Powell and board at an ordinary stop, where cars will pick up if there is room, though full ones will sail past; or go before about nine in the morning, when the turnaround queue is short.
On fares: a single ride is a flat fare well above a bus fare and includes no onward transfer, so two separate rides cost twice as much. Muni day and multi-day passes include the cable cars and pay for themselves almost immediately — the conductor reads a Clipper card or a pass on a phone. Paper transfers from buses are not accepted.
Riding on the outside running board, holding the pole, is the entire point and is permitted. Both hands, and keep arms and legs inboard: cars pass one another with very little clearance indeed.
One correction, because it recurs in older accounts of the city. No cable car goes anywhere near the Palace of Fine Arts, and none goes anywhere near the Golden Gate Bridge. Between them the three lines cover Nob Hill, Russian Hill, the edge of Chinatown, the downtown end of Market Street and the two waterfront termini. Nothing runs west of Van Ness Avenue.
The lines link Union Square, Chinatown and Fisherman's Wharf, which is the walk most visitors end up doing anyway. General practicalities are on the San Francisco page.