Fewer people are riding San Francisco's iconic cable cars. Here’s how far ridership has fallen

By Ricardo Cano | San Francisco Chronicle (TNS)

SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco’s iconic cable cars have had a tumultuous couple of years.

Beloved by tourists and residents, cable cars have been a fixture of the city for more than 150 years, but were shut down in March 2020 amid stay-at-home orders during the pandemic. The cable cars sat idle in their barn at Washington and Mason streets for 17 months before the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency brought them back in August 2021.

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The city’s cable car ridership has been slow to recover since then, according to data the SFMTA reports to the Federal Transit Administration, and has significantly declined compared to before the pandemic.

As of February, San Francisco’s famed cable cars had recovered about 58% of their 2019 ridership, when the cars registered between 430,000 and 480,000 passenger trips per month.

Post-pandemic ridership on the city’s three cable car lines peaked, so far, in August when they logged almost 295,000 passenger trips.

The ridership recovery of the city’s cable cars has mirrored San Francisco’s sluggish tourism and downtown economic recovery. However, the slow rebound is also happening as the city is running less service.

Currently, the SFMTA operates the cable car system from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., opening later and closing sooner and making fewer trips than in 2019. That has amounted to more than a 30% decline in cable car service compared to 2019, according to the FTA’s National Transit Database.

That doesn’t mean it’s any less expensive to run the cable car system, which the transportation agency operates at a loss. The agency generated $24.5 million in fare revenue from cable cars in 2019, according to the Federal Transit Administration, with service costs at $70 million.

Cable car operating costs rose slightly to $74 million in 2022, while fare revenues for that year dropped to $10.8 million.

It’s unclear when, or whether, the city’s cable cars will fully recover from their pandemic-induced slump, though ridership has steadily increased since service restarted in 2021.

Even with depressed ridership, crowds of people can often be seen waiting in line at the Powell Street turnaround to board a cable car that takes them up the steep hills on Powell and Hyde streets.

And enthusiasts will be able to ride a cable car at a discount from the usual $8 one-way fares. The SFMTA’s board of directors this month approved a $1.4 billion operating budget that includes $5 all-day passes for the California Street cable car line. Officials piloted the day passes last year and sought to make them permanent, citing their popularity.

Reach Ricardo Cano: [email protected]; Twitter: @ByRicardoCano

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