When the “Cable Car Ladies” Won

A new paper reminds us that the so-called “Google Buses” aren’t the first time San Francisco has fought over who transportation’s meant to serve.

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Today the big debate over transportation in San Francisco has to do with so-called “Google Buses,” those privately run tech company coaches that are, to some, a logical way to run city-dwelling workers out to their Silicon Valley offices but that are also, to others, “symbols for alienation and division,” as the Guardian recently put it.

A compelling new paper in the Journal of Urban History reminds us that the City by the Bay has been in a similar place before. Damon Scott, a professor of geography and American studies at Ohio’s Miami University, tells the story of the mid-20th century’s “Cable Car Wars.”

It was the 1940s, and local businessmen, regulators and politicians were eager to do away with the city’s cable cars in favor of diesel coaches. To the mayor at the time, a shipping tycoon named Roger D. Lapham, getting rid of noisy, slow, uncomfortable and worn-out cable cars meant modernization. They were of the past, and a modern, efficient San Francisco needed motor coaches. To make the point, the city held a parade. Writes Scott:

As a dramatization staged for public consumption, the participants acted out a linear narrative of transit improvements that accentuated the differences between the past and the future. On one level, the progression from a series of horse-powered vehicles to a shiny new bus rendered the latter a harbinger of a new age in transit. It was self-evident that — with its powerful engine, sleek appearance, and smooth ride — the bus was a vast improvement over the plodding, antique horse car. It followed then that just as electric traction streetcars had replaced horse-drawn vehicles, motor coaches would soon take over streetcar routes. The culmination of the parade with a shiny new demonstration coach implied that the street- and cable cars currently in use would soon become novel forms of outmoded transit, fetishized artifacts of rapidly receding past. More generally, transit modernization was presented as an issue of historical importance — a cause for collective celebration of civic progress.

If the idealized San Franciscan today is the tech worker, back then it was the “motorman” driving new buses. Lapham and other mayors of the time would put on a motorman’s cab every time he initiated a new form of public transportation, as a way of symbolizing its benefit to the working man. But things changed, Scott writes, in 1947, when a group of women led by Friedel Klussmann launched a campaign to save the cable cars.

The so-called Cable Car Ladies rejected the assumption that cable cars should be condemned to history’s dust bin simply because they weren’t especially rational. They liked the cable cars, and used them to get around their city just fine. “In sharp contrast to the Mayor’s characterization of the vehicles as too dangerous and too costly to keep in service,” Scott writes, “the women stressed the good safety record and the symbolic value of the cable cars.”

One of the tactics was putting cable cars all over consumer products:

Downtown retailers, keenly interested in enhancing the appeal — as well as accessibility — of the central city shopping district to middle-class women, also participated by displaying and selling cable car–themed merchandise. At two of the major downtown department stores, Macy’s and the Emporium, cable car print dresses flew off the racks. The proliferation of cable car–themed consumer goods fueled the elevation of a quotidian, albeit picturesque, form of transit into an iconic image of the city.

Lapham dismissed the Cable Car Ladies as “sentimentalists [who] do not have to pay the bills.” But the tide was largely with the women, especially as the cable car itself became gendered. One poster of the time showed a smiling cable car with the tag line, “She never knew she had so many friends.”

“These women,” Scott writes, “successfully challenged the mayor’s narrative of transit progress with an alternative vision of the place of cable cars in the city’s transit landscape.”

Truth be told, in the end the outcome for the cable car was mixed. The city moved to protect them, but 60 years later they’re less part of San Francisco’s public transportation network than the way tourists get around. “The transit history of San Francisco has not been as a linear parade of progress where novelty always supplants the well-worn,” Scott writes. “It has been a carnival that continues on.”

Now that the motor coaches loved by Lapham have become the “old” mode of transportation, I asked Scott by email for his take on these new tech buses.

Scott responded that he once lived above San Francisco’s Alamo Square, and would watch from his second floor window as “the Google Buses would regularly use the MUNI bus stop for loading and unloading, and MUNI buses would have to lumber around them.” It looked to him like a private transit system degrading a public transit system, he said, and “it really angered me.”

Correction: An earlier version of this piece incorrectly rendered the name of the person credited with leading the campaign to save San Francisco’s cable cars. She is Friedel Klussmann, not Fiedel Klussman.

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Nancy Scola is a Washington, DC-based journalist whose work tends to focus on the intersections of technology, politics, and public policy. Shortly after returning from Havana she started as a tech reporter at POLITICO.

Tags: infrastructurepublic transportationsan franciscoshared citygoogle

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