Every visitor who’s everclutched a wooden bench as the Powell-Hyde car crests Russian Hill, catching Lombard Street's crooked switchbacks laid out below, takes for granted the cable cars of San Francisco as an intrinsic part of the city’s charm, along with the fog and extortionate rent. But they're not. The irony is that the same city has deliberately wiped them out twice. According to a 2023 blog post by San Francisco's transit agency, SFMTA, the entire system began after a British-born mining engineer named Andrew Smith Hallidie watched a horse-drawn streetcar slip on wet cobblestones and drag its team of horses down a hill, where they all died. It seems like that image never faded from his mind. He had already been using steel cable to lift ores out of mines and in 1873 he proposed that a city could be hauled up its hills the same way.
A test run that was supposed to have gone undetected before dawn
