Our valued Market Street Railway members make it possible for us to do what we do. But exactly what is it that we do? You see the obvious: our San Francisco Railway Museum, our promotion of the streetcars and cable cars to engage new generations of fans, our streetcar acquisition, our Inside Track members magazine, and much more. But really, the most important thing we have done over the past 35 years is like an iceberg: it’s 90 percent invisible from the surface.
It’s advocacy.
Advocacy has been—and remains—essential to keeping the historic streetcars on the streets of San Francisco and improving cable car service. Through ongoing, time-intensive outreach, we have built support for the historic vehicles among generations of elected and appointed city officials, influential neighborhood and business groups, organized labor, and other key constituencies. This isn’t as much fun as choosing the livery for a PCC or enjoying special trips during Heritage Weekend, but those fun things, and indeed the historic streetcars themselves, wouldn’t be possible without our history of successful advocacy. We do it in a low-key way, so it’s possible that some of you, our members and friends, don’t know the extent of our work. It’s important that you do.
Overcoming skepticism
Transit professionals everywhere face myriad challenges. They have to balance priorities and respond to numerous competing interests for the public dollars entrusted to them. Almost all transit agencies have processes for public feedback. What tends to happen in many places—and certainly happens in San Francisco—is that some members of the public can’t resist criticizing transit professionals at every opportunity, in public hearings and on social media, to anyone who will pay attention. Understandably, these people may soon be tuned out by agency staff and leadership, and their carping gets no results.
By extension, more measured voices can be tainted by the persistent nay-sayers. Those who want a thoughtful dialogue with staff sometimes don’t get the benefit of the doubt and their ideas are written off. This is often true in the area of heritage operations. Transit agency staff who have found themselves repeatedly questioned by rail fans about why this or that hasn’t happened, or wasn’t done to their satisfaction, dismiss fans as “foamers” who are neither knowledgeable nor serious. An unfair characterization in most cases, but it happens.
Even when a heritage operation gets its start with the help of powerful politicians and groups, it can wither unless it is continually tended. This has happened in numerous cities, such as Seattle, where Councilman George Benson’s waterfront streetcar line, using Melbourne trams, was shut down not long after Benson was out of office. It appears that the transit agency seized on the first excuse that came along.
In San Jose, where then-Supervisor Rod Diridon successfully championed a new light rail system that included vintage streetcars circling the city’s downtown, the vintage component was all but eliminated after Diridon left office. Something similar happened to the replica Council Crest vintage streetcars in Portland. Memphis’ Main Street Trolley, more or less forced on the transit agency, MATA, was always treated as a stepchild by the agency, with abysmally poor maintenance that resulted in two streetcar fires that shut down the lines. (Jolted into action by a federal investigation, MATA hired retired Muni streetcar maintenance superintendent Karl Johnson to help bring the system back properly, and it recently resumed limited operation.) We hear rumors that San Diego transit officials want to end the vintage PCC service championed by their retiring board chair Harry Mathis. (We hope not.)
Early lessons learned
This kind of thing has a history in San Francisco, too, but fortunately, we also have a history of civic activism in support of our city’s icons. Famously, Mayor Roger Lapham tried to scrap the Powell Street cable cars in favor of buses in 1947, only to be resoundingly defeated at the ballot box by a group of preservationists led by Friedel Klussmann and other women at a time when women’s views were politically disregarded.
The preservation of historic streetcars in San Francisco would have been stillborn but for the strong support of then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein, who responded to the 1983 proposal of Chamber of Commerce Executive Director John Jacobs and this author (then the head of the Chamber’s transportation committee) to mount a “substitute attraction” for the cable car system, then being rebuilt. Despite resistance from key people in Muni, the mayor carried the day, aided by the timely arrival of a new Muni General Manager, Harold Geissenheimer, who in a happy coincidence was a noted rail fan. The support of Mayor Feinstein ensured that first “Historic Trolley Festival” would be repeated for five summers, creating momentum for the permanent F-line. (As US Senator, she has continued to be a big supporter of the streetcars and, of course, the cable cars.)
At the same time, Maurice Klebolt, a travel agent, rail fan, and part-time Muni operator was strengthening his campaign with members of the Board of Supervisors, whom he had supported with contributions for years, to keep streetcars on Market Street. When the small nonprofit Market Street Railway, founded years earlier to preserve a bus, took over the Trolley Festival support role from the Chamber, Maury was a nonstop membership-builder and lobbyist until his death in 1988.
But we didn’t depend on just elected officials’ support, as important as it was. We reached out to affected community groups, particularly the Castro neighborhood, showing businesses how this could help bring customers to them and reminding residences that the streetcars provided a reliable and enjoyable alternative to the Market Street Subway.
We have repeated this constant outreach through seven subsequent mayors, dozens of members of the Board of Supervisors and of Muni’s governing boards, and scores of business and community groups.
That advocacy has served the streetcars very well when they were threatened. For example, on two occasions, Muni staff proposed raising the streetcar fare to match the cable car fare, ignoring the very large number of Upper Market and waterfront residents who use it for daily transit service. Both proposals were soon withdrawn. Efforts have been made at the staff level to discontinue E-line service as soon as it was started, and to reduce F-line service despite the high ridership levels every day at every hour. In all these cases, the constituencies we have built weighed in to protect the streetcars.
Persistence pays
In effective advocacy, two things matter most: focus and persistence. In our work, we focus on what’s politically and financially realistic, then build a constituency for it, and work to help our friends in the public sector identify the funding for it. An example is our current work on the E-line extension to Aquatic Park.
Persistence comes into play in areas that have been seminal to our mission from the beginning, including achieving restoration and regular use of irreplaceable original Muni streetcars and iconic pre-World War II streetcars from around the world that reflect San Francisco’s heritage as an international city. Many would have given up on this objective in the face of continued past indifference by Muni leadership, but with patient persistence, we have won agreement on the value of double-end vintage streetcars in particular, both in filling the specific need for such equipment on the E-line and for their flexibility of operation on the F-line as well.
As we approach final success on these items and others, we are turning our eyes to the long-term, advocating for a permanent Muni streetcar restoration unit to keep the fleet in top condition in decades to come. And we are beginning a new effort to restore the traditional view corridor “halfway to the stars” from the Powell Street cable car turntable to the top of Nob Hill.
Two-way street
We never forget that public servants, elected or appointed, face criticism from some element of the public almost every day. That’s truer than ever now in a densely-populated, highly diverse city like San Francisco, where citizens are encouraged to speak their minds. To be clear, it is right for citizens to expect public sector workers to put in a fair day’s work for the pay and benefits they receive, and for public sector leadership to listen to all sides of a question before deciding. But when a citizen or group constantly complains and carps at public officials without ever doing anything to show support for the things those officials do that they agree with, those citizens or groups often simply get tuned out and ignored.
That’s why Market Street Railway tries to be positive in public, drawing attention to the ongoing successes of vintage transit in San Francisco, celebrating the contributions of those public servants who continue to make it possible and generally staying quiet in public (but not in private) about those who have tried to undermine the historic operations.
We have been delighted, for example, to donate our color calendar, celebrating the streetcars and cable cars, to every recipient of the Muni Safe Driver Awards, bus as well as rail, for several years now. This year, we are supporting cable car operators in the senior citizen lunch they host every holiday season. We make our voice heard where it counts on transit matters outside our direct mission, in support of Muni and SFMTA goals.
Unique relationship
We’ve been told by any number of transit industry professionals around the world how unusual our relationship with Muni/SFMTA is. They note that a large number of managers in the industry regard lovers of vintage equipment as somehow impeding their work, dismiss them as unserious, and sometimes even harass them. There’s no question this has happened at Muni. There have been times when some in leadership positions let their subordinates know they were no fans of the streetcars, or of Market Street Railway. But we have patiently persevered through those periods, trying our best to remain positive and helpful with our contacts at all levels of the organization.
And over the years, even those insiders who dislike the streetcars and cable cars learn the deep reservoir of support they enjoy in the community, and the professional peril of trying to cripple them or slander the efforts of supporters like Market Street Railway. We believe we have gradually cemented the historic streetcars into a permanent presence on the streets of San Francisco, and have built relationships that will make these wonderful museums in motion even more valuable—and valued—to their riders, to Muni itself, and to the livability and attractiveness of San Francisco, in decades to come.
Please help
I hope you can see the need for telling and retelling stories like these to ensure continued and broad support for our mission. Help us make sure that the activities we initiate and report on are continued into the future. Please consider making a generous special year-end donation to Market Street Railway to help us cover that last mile. You can do that here, or by sending a check to our office, 870 Market Street, Suite 803, San Francisco CA 94102.
Thanks for your continued support.
