Cable Cars In Danger Amid Budget Crisis

It’s hard to imagine San Francisco without its iconic cable cars. If you remember the eerie quiet on California Street during lockdown, you’ve realized how integral to SF’s character they are. A proposed budget cut is threatening to suspend service on the last of the city’s cable car lines. If the California, Mason and Hyde Street lines went dormant (the F-Market streetcar too), SFMTA Executive Director Jeffrey Tumlin estimates it could save $33 million a year. (ABC7)

Why cable car service is on the chopping block

Proposition L’s defeat shoulders most of the blame. Although a majority of city voters approved a hefty tax on rideshare companies to finance Muni, Prop M won more support. Proposition M came with a gutting hidden clause that barred a projected $25 million budget increase. (SF Standard) If Prop L had beaten its neighboring letter, SFMTA wouldn’t have resorted to such drastic measures.

Tumlin preemptively blames the incoming Trump administration as well. Donald Trump’s dislike of San Francisco despite owning a share of one of our tallest skyscrapers is well-known. 

SEE ALSO: “Snake on Muni Frightens Some, Fascinates Others“

“As you probably know, from last week’s election it’s unlikely [the] federal government is going to come to our rescue again,” said Tumlin.

It’s not just cable cars at risk of being shelved. Per KQED, our transit agency’s cuts also “include reducing the frequency of many busy bus and train lines.”

SFMTA’s scrimping strategies include:

• Suspending service on lower-utilized routes: This would eliminate 20 routes serving about 50,000 riders. Net savings: $63 million.
• Reducing service frequency by as much as 50%: Would affect the system’s busiest routes, including the 14/14R-Mission and 38/38R-Geary, and all six Muni Metro lines. Net savings: $71 million.
• Suspending regular bus and train service at 9 p.m. each night and replace with less frequent Owl Service. It would affect as many as 28 routes. Net savings: $14 million.
• Suspending cable car and historic streetcar service: Net savings: $33 million.
  (KQED, SFMTA, 2024)

Whose cable car line is it anyway? 

To locals, riding the cable car is in the same ballpark as visiting Alcatraz or Fisherman’s Wharf. It isn’t as tacky as Times Square is to NYC, but not many San Franciscans commute via cable car. It’s partly because the three remaining lines have a fraction of the former cable car system’s reach. The rest is likely due to the ridiculous cost to ride it, which, while covered by Muni’s $81 monthly pass, is too steep for spontaneous use.

Killing off the cable car frustrates tourists who come from all over to ride them up and down our hills. “It belongs to San Francisco, very famous in the whole world,” Anke Heidrich told ABC7. A Bay Area local who’d left recently returned and used the California line to reach their hotel from downtown. “The cable car was a useful mode of transit for my business trip. You should be very proud to have these, never let them go,” they wrote. 

“I liked seeing the elderly locals who hopped on with their Trader Joe’s groceries and hopped off at the top of Nob Hill,” they added. “What a charmed life.”

“From an environmental standpoint, cable is in a class of its own. Due to its use of gravity and counter-balancing, it is not uncommon for maintenance workers to witness a cable system’s energy consumption drop below zero during peak loads. That is, the system itself can generate power.”
—NewGeography (2010)

I worry SFMTA might blame cable car operators themselves, who make $86k a year according to Libertarian think-tank Cato Institute. In their opinion, cable car operators, known as “gripmen,” are overcompensated (apparently health insurance and sick pay are not Libertarian values). Their wages account for most of the profanely high cost to ride the cable car, currently set at $8 one way. That’s not a sign of overdemanding employees, it means SFMTA is foisting the cost of employing skilled workers onto riders.

Why doesn’t SFMTA try a different approach?

In 2023, NYC began fare-capping, which one 2015 study defined as: “Fare capping is built upon the concept of a guaranteed lowest fare. This ensures that users will only be charged the lowest fare for which they are eligible based on their travel behaviour, which can be especially useful where the fare structure is based on a complex mix of distance and time-based products. The concept of fare capping is consistent with the move towards simplified fare structures as the complexity of the required calculations are hidden from passengers (e.g. passengers only need to know that their fare is capped at $5, not how the cap is calculated).”

Fare-capping public transit wouldn’t just make it more accessible to riders who can’t afford an $8 one-way novelty ride. It would also encourage more people to use Muni overall. SFMTA should loosen their chokehold on the cable car experience by beefing up the rest of their fleet this way. Imagine if BART joined in on the fun. One flat, capped fee for longer-distance trips is the way to go. Making public transportation more appealing and more efficient simultaneously will only help the Bay Area’s sparse network of transit authorities.