he driving force behind the San Francisco cable car system came from a man who witnessed a horrible accident on a typically damp summer day in 1869. Andrew Smith Hallidie saw the toll slippery grades could extract when a horse-drawn streetcar slid backwards under its heavy load. The steep slope with wet cobblestones and a heavily weighted vehicle combined to drag five horses to their deaths. Although such a sight would stun anyone, Hallidie and his partners had the know-how to do something about the problem.

The San Francisco Cable Car website

able cars were invented by Andrew Smith Hallidie here in San Francisco in 1873. Hallidie's cable car system was based on early mining conveyance systems and dominated the city’s transit scene for more than 30 years. Hallidie's cable car system would survive the great San Francisco earthquake and fires of 1906, soldier on through two World Wars and outlast political attempts to remove the cars from city steets in the late 1940s and 1950s to become the worldwide symbol of San Francisco that it is today.

San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency

o one who has ever ridden on a San Francisco cable car will ever forget the experience. The freewheeling downhill roller coaster, the wild rushes through intersections, the apparently hopeless forays into avalanches of autos, the people who hang onto the outside poles and lean into the street on the curves, the conductors who must remember who paid his tare and who didn't, the gripmen who sweat and strain but who really enjoy it, all belong to the cable car, and to the cable car alone.

The cars have died out slowly since their peak at the turn of the century. The green cars of Powell Street and the red cars of California are all that remain from the glory days before the firequake of 1906. Yet the surprising thing is that any cable cars are left at all. San Francisco has hung on to these last pieces of nostalgia not merely as an oddity to attract tourists (they are that), but also as a part of the peculiar charm of living on the Bay.

San Francisco is a romantic city — steeped and simmered in the indelible tradition of comparatively easy living. The city is up with the times, without a doubt, but it treats the times differently than do most cities. The cable car can't keep up with the powerful electric busses which hiss up the city's steepest hills with effortless ease, or even the modern automobile, yet it is still part of the lifeblood of countless thousands who live in and around the Golden Gate. In its unhurried, wandering crawl from one point to another, it seems to refute the mad pace of modern living.

Mike Palmer / The Cable Cars of San Francisco / 1959