In 1873, San Francisco tested underground cable cars for hills too steep for horse-drawn streetcars; the city’s cable cars still climb those streets today

Every visitor who’s everclutched a wooden bench as the Powell-Hyde car crests Russian Hill, catching Lombard Street's crooked switchbacks laid out below, takes for granted the cable cars of San Francisco as an intrinsic part of the city’s charm, along with the fog and extortionate rent. But they're not. The irony is that the same city has deliberately wiped them out twice. According to a 2023 blog post by San Francisco's transit agency, SFMTA, the entire system began after a British-born mining engineer named Andrew Smith Hallidie watched a horse-drawn streetcar slip on wet cobblestones and drag its team of horses down a hill, where they all died. It seems like that image never faded from his mind. He had already been using steel cable to lift ores out of mines and in 1873 he proposed that a city could be hauled up its hills the same way.

A test run that was supposed to have gone undetected before dawn

The contract said the line had to be running by August 1, 1873. Hallidie was one day late and tested his invention at 4 a.m. Aug. 2 in Clay Street, primarily to ensure that no one of importance was near when it failed. It didn't. A month later, on September 1, 1873, Clay Street Hill Railroad began accepting paying riders for a nickel a ride, and by the turn of the century there were eight competing railroads with over 50 miles of cable track running through the city.

There's one thing that's missing from the postcard rendition: it was successful because it addressed a real, no-Hollywood problem: steep hills that horses could not easily climb, not because 19th-century San Francisco was unusually stylish in public transit. Utility came first. The charm was added on after the thing was almost scrapped.

The Americans who almost demolished their own icon

By the 1940s, cable cars were widely seen as outdated relics: a drag on the city's employment and maintenance budgets. In 1947, the mayor of San Francisco decided to switch out of the majority of the remaining lines for buses. It wasn't city planners or preservation experts who held him back; it was a homemaker named Friedel Klussmann, who put together a citizens' committee and put the issue on the ballot. The voters rallied behind her in droves. The city's own transit historians recount that the measure to keep the system running passed by a landslide: 166,105 votes to 51,452, a margin of about 76.3 percent.

This occurred again in the 1950s when a second wave of cuts, again documented by the nonprofit Market Street Railway, pared the network down to the three lines that still operate today. Americans are sentimental about old machinery, and that's why the cable cars were preserved in San Francisco. The surviving three-line system was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964, one of the first moving objects, rather than buildings, to receive the designation. The official designation from the National Park Service encompasses the cable and rail, the powerhouse that still drives the entire system from a single building on Nob Hill, the turntables, and the underground cable and rail.

Why this should irk you a bit

San Francisco retained its "outdated" and labor-intensive rail system precisely because the citizenry did not allow the planners to build over it and replace it with something more cost-effective and generic. American cities never got a Friedel Klussmann; they got a bus line named after what was bulldozed. It's not that the cable cars are charming because they are old; they are charming precisely because they are an example that shows a city's transit does not need to be streamlined to death, and that sometimes the thing worth keeping is the thing that's slightly inconvenient to run.