RailNews

UPDATE: San Francisco Cable Cars, Streetcars to Return to Service

A MUNI cable car climbs Russian Hill in June 2016. Photo by Justin Franz. 

UPDATE: San Francisco Cable Cars, Streetcars to Return to Service

UPDATED: March 2, 8 p.m. EST

SAN FRANCISCO — A year after the city’s iconic cable cars and streetcars were parked due to the pandemic, San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency announced Tuesday that the vintage transit vehicles would be returning to service in the coming months. 

Last year, the cable cars and streetcars were taken out-of-service over concerns that there was no way to protect the operators from the passengers or the passengers from each other. Last summer, Jeffrey Tumlin, MUNI’s director of transportation, said the cable cars would be parked at least until there was a vaccine and until this week the agency’s board did not have a timeline for when it would restore service on its three cable car lines or two historic streetcar lines. But on Tuesday afternoon, it announced that the streetcars would be back on the F and E lines in May and at least one cable car line, Powell-Hyde, would return this fall. 

MUNI is currently working on installing plastic barriers on its historic PCCs to separate operators from passengers. According to the Market Street Railway, the non-profit group that supports the operation of historic transit in the city, the F and E lines will initially operate eight hours a day. Before the pandemic, streetcars would run between Fisherman’s Wharf and The Castro upwards of 18 hours per day. 

“Market Street Railway has worked very hard for months now, side by side with Muni’s operator’s union (Local 250A) and numerous business and neighborhood groups to get the iconic cable cars and F line streetcars back on the street,” the group wrote on Tuesday. “We thank Mayor London Breed and SFMTA leadership for finding a way to return these symbols of our city to the street during these challenging budget times. They’ll send a sign to the Bay Area, California, and the world that San Francisco is back in business.”

The cable cars have been a presence in San Francisco since the 1870s and this isn’t the first time the fleet has been parked. Many cable car lines were destroyed during the 1906 earthquake, which brought about a wave of electric streetcar lines. In the 1940s, civic leaders tried to scrap the system for good, but a grassroots effort saved them. In the early 1980s, the surviving three lines — California Street, Powell-Mason, and Powell-Hyde — were completely rebuilt. It is the world’s last manually operated cable car system. 

The historic streetcar line, the F line, first opened in 1995 and was expanded down the Embarcadero with the E line in 2008. MUNI maintains a fleet of historic streetcars from around the world, but the bulk of it is made up of classic PCC streetcars from the 1930s until the 1950s. 

This article was posted on: March 2, 2021