The cable car system of San Francisco is the last manually operated cable car system in the world, with three of the original twenty-three lines still operating today. With these systems being installed between 1873 and 1890, they were due major maintenance and upgrades by the time the 1980s and with it their 100th year of operation rolled around. This rebuilding and upgrading process was recorded in a documentary by a local SF television station, which makes for some fascinating viewing.
While the cars themselves were fairly straight-forward to restore, and the original grips that’d latch onto the cable didn’t need any changes. But there were upgrades to the lubrication used (originally pine tar), and the powerhouse (the ‘barn’) was completely gutted and rebuilt.
As opposed to a funicular system where the cars are permanently attached to the cable, a cable car system features a constantly moving cable that the cars can grip onto at will, with most of the wear and tear on the grip dies. Despite researchers at San Francisco State University (SFSU) investigating alternatives, the original metal grip dies were left in place, despite their 4-day replacement schedule.
Ultimately, the rails and related guides were all ripped out and replaced with new ones, with the rails thermite-welded in place, and the cars largely rebuilt from scratch. Although new technologies were used where available, the goal was to keep the look as close as possible to what it looked at the dawn of the 20th century. While more expensive than demolishing and scrapping the original buildings and rolling stock, this helped to keep the look that has made it a historical symbol when the upgraded system rolled back into action on June 21, 1984.
Decades later, this rebuilt cable car system is still running as smoothly as ever, thanks to these efforts. Although SF’s cable car system is reportedly mostly used by tourists, the technology has seen somewhat of a resurgence. Amidst a number of funicular systems, a true new cable car system can be found in the form of e.g. the MiniMetro system which fills the automated people mover niche.
Thanks to [JRD] for the tip.
I guess if it’s old, repair it, but if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.
Despite YIMBY ravings and fever-dreams, the thing holding us back from useful public transport (which we have already had before with Edwardian technology) is primarily social technology, not engineering. I can’t stand hearing the term “high-speed rail.” High-speed rail doesn’t exist outside Japan. They have the social technology.
I think all major countries could use a bit less population. The world will not end if we went back to population figures from the 1980s or 2000s; the only challenge is defeating bureaucrats who will panic and try to enact massive population transfers (like you mentioned) to keep pensions from getting a little smaller and ensure that GDP growth line go up forever.
Birthrates will pick up again once the world isn’t a stifling, suffocating global hospice care.
And by “social technology” I do not mean socialism btw. Not sure if that was what you were assuming or not
Except in places in the west, public transport worked or works wonders. Ever been to berlin in the past 15 years? Yeah. Public transport is faster than car or bicycle there. Also pretty cheap. Also pretty safe. I’ve seen a guy shoot up on an outside staircase of the S-bahn but not once saw someone being aggressive. Just people minding their own – sometimes sad – business.
In the Netherlands, before the government changed the business objective from ‘Make as little operational loss as possible’ to ‘start making profit’ for the national railway company, we had an amazing and reliable rail network here. Right now the system is rotting due to price increases and service cuts to keep the railway company breaking even. But a well running rail system benefits everyone. From the guys in finance who commute to Amsterdam or Rotterdam and don’t wanna sit in traffic all morning, to those who cannot afford a car.
There is more between socialism and capitalism. Do not fall in the trap of polarisation and black and white thinking. We can have a market economy, as well as public transport that is a service to all. Don’t forget, the roads are generally paid from public money too. The Netherlands is the proof. We had exactly what i mean from the 1960s till about 2001. Big multinational corporations as well as great public services.
100% Correct. It’s the same thing in the UK: services for profit just makes things worse. One of the interesting things, not yet picked up in this thread is that the early trams (aka street cars) in the US were publicly owned, electric and charged really low prices for travel. However, in the 20s or thirties, they allowed it to get bought out by a tyre company; which promptly scrapped them all, forcing people to use fossil fuel transport.
https://llewellyn.substack.com/p/how-we-got-here
The issue with allowing operation at a loss is that the cost are socialized while the benefit goes to a small number of people who live in the inner city, who are generally on the consuming and services-producing or benefit-receiving end of the economic equation in the first place, so the whole thing turns into other people paying the service for the few. Where I’m at, a recent study found that between 70-80% of the train ridership belong to subsidized groups of people on top of the whole train system being state subsidized in the first place, so not only are they not making any profit, the state is also paying itself for the tickets.
Then, with politicians being politicians, a public service like transportation tends to grow and become more and more inefficient over time with diminishing returns. The costs balloon out of control as the politicians buy votes by expanding the system, but there’s no money for it without increasing taxes so other services start to suffer. Eventually it starts to cost so much that the government simply wants to bail itself out, so they privatize it, and the private owners start to rationalize the service, and then everybody starts blaming the private economy when the trains no longer stop every mile, the ticket prices start reflecting the cost of the service, and the buses don’t run at 3 am on Sundays.
Yes
The traditional three sector model of economy separates the society into:
1. basic production of raw materials and resources
2. industry and adding value on point 1. through refinement
3. services that facilitate points 1. and 2.
The more modern take on the matter splits sector number 3. further into points that help the basic creation of value, and those that consume the value created for entertainment, luxury, art, pure academic interests and government, and then the meta-services on top of that – the so called “pure services”. There is a part that produces and there is a part that consumes, and the balance in between those two determines whether the society grows or dwindles in fortune and living standards.
With de-industrialization and urbanization, the majority of people now belong to some sub-group of services – the services economy – and the public services that apply in the urban environment, such as public transportation, generally serve people who no longer add to the wealth and resources of the society but simply consume it and cause other people to consume it for the point of trading the value for profit. This reflects in the income distribution of the society: the majority are fighting for scraps while the few sitting at the top are enjoying luxury, because the society is fundamentally structured to serve them.
Focusing funding on public transportation in the cities is simply socializing the cost of city living to enable more people to live in this manner, at the expense of taxing and exploiting people who are still trying to work for the bottom line and make more value for everyone to consume. It’s missing the point entirely. It’s not making it easier for people to live, it’s just making it easier or necessary to stay put in a place where you’re being impoverished and miserable, dependent on public services. What the people should do is move out of the city to do actual work that makes real wealth instead of services and retail that only transmit value and increase prices.
All of swamp Germany is smaller than a single big city.
If you got out more, you wouldn’t give such dumb advice.
If your advice is ‘be Amsterdam’ there isn’t much to say…Dutch beer sucks.
Roads and mass transit are both paid for with Gasoline/Petrol taxes.
In the USA, as fuel efficiency has improved, that tax doesn’t cover it anymore. But in Europe it’s still 100% true.
For decades the ‘highway tax fund’ was a cash cow for every DC twit that could peddle influence.
Raided for every bad idea from Amtrack to light rail.
Too bad about the euro cars that high fuel cost has produced.
US citizens need to stop getting triggered by the word ‘Socialism’. To most people it doesn’t mean ‘Communism’. It can mean anything from Social Democracy to worker-owned businesses (Cooperativism) to Democratic Socialism, to the kind of Communism US citizens think about. They’re all different.
And TG wasn’t even talking about those, he was just thinking of “Social Technology” meaning, an attitude towards individualism vs collaboration.
The “social technology” in place in Japan is mostly about having crushingly high population densities and deliberate policies discouraging and inconveniencing car ownership, such as a lack of zoning for adequate parking and then demanding a person to own a parking space to be permitted to own a car. It has nothing to do with collaboration and everything to do with overpopulation and social engineering to deal with it.
There is another reason for their unity, their persistence in high-trust behavior…
High trust or high conformity to social norms?
After all, there’s no lack of criminality or morally reprehensible behavior in Japan – it’s simply tolerated in limited circumstances and not talked about in public.
Get over it.
Marx had only bad ideas.
Throw away and start again, perhaps this time without the antisemitism.
‘Socialism’ does indeed predate Marxism.
But Marxists love that trick:
Do you approve of worker owned business?
You’re a socialist…which is just Marxism…Except without the mass murder.
Let’s ban private ownership of ‘means of production’ (including worker owned business)!
Start a special police force to deal with ‘counterrevolutionaries’.
Commies love to rename themselves.
Understandable.
Anybody would want to run from the megadeaths.
Commie: Communist, or anything else the MFers rename themselves. Syn. Anarcho-syndicalist, Green (watermelon), Socialist, Maoist, Bolshevik etc etc.
No, I wasn’t talking about that, but I think that all of those things are basically terrible. Old-school communism a la Stalin extinguished human life dramatically, in huge spectacles. Famines were abject and obvious. The new way is simply a graying-out of human life and society. Osteoporosis of civilization. Stagnation and the frustrating of will, interest, intensity. Both lead to the same place at different a different rate.
The latter is an innovation on the former, because the former was too fast and shocking and prompted reaction. The latter is slow and comforting until it’s too late.
Both essentially hate the reality of life and substitute it with simulated-substitute “life,” and then all contradictions are plastered over with fig leaves made up of friendly words like “safety” and “dignity.” But the decline is absolutely incontrovertible. And everyone has a secret voice in their hearts constantly screaming “I hate this,” keeping them from sleeping at night.
The economic situation of the US today is quite a bit different than that of 20th century Eastern Europe. Besides, we already have socialism in the US and people don’t seem to notice it.
I would worry more about government corruption and rise of authoritarianism. That’s a far more common cause to national strife and collapse of governments.
Japan’s birthrate is 6.653 per 1K. Compared to Ukraine’s 5.753. And amusingly (or unsurprisingly) Vatican City is at 4.635. (source: CIA World Factbook 2021)
More important than adding infants to your population is to add working age adults. Which is why immigration is vital for a nation’s economic growth. And the lack of open immigration is holding Japan back right now. Making it difficult to staff some industries. Because who wants to work in a nursing home at a low wage when they have a bachelor’s degree?
No you don’t. You have mixed economy schemes that some people try to call “socialism” either to argue against it, or to sell actual socialism by the back door.
We have socialism for the political clients of the state and hard-nosed self-sufficiency for the tax base. It’s a two-tiered system. So yes, a mixed economy scheme. But the US has been obsessed with socialism since before WWI
Socialism is the public ownership of the means of production, which means that the state owns all business as an intermediary for the people, who reside under state control, which in effect means that the state owns all business and the people have no control regardless of any rhetoric about the state being for the people.
What you have is the private ownership influencing the state, to create rules and regulations on the private economy, otherwise known as crony capitalism. It’s a sort of pretend-socialism where the state claims to have control, and to represent the people, but they’re actually representing the top elite of the economy. These “clients” aren’t paying the establishment for “socialism” – they are the establishment.
American car and bus companies killed the “social technology”. American cities had cable cars and trollies. They were bought up and disposed up. “who killed the red car”
Nope, that’s pure unadulterated cope. The car and bus companies are not what killed US high trust public behavior. You still are unable to grok what happened last century at all
Wait, SF still has a loony bin? You sure can’t tell by looking
I was actually in SF about the time they would have been wrapping up the refurb project and lived up the road just a few hours but don’t recall being aware of the project.
Norcalian by birth, but I haven’t been to SF in decades. From what I hear, it is a looney bin. Don’t do drugs, kids.
I do think the video will be worth a watch when I get a chance, but the city sounds like a lost cause to me.
Yeah, that’s what I assumed. They decided that doing positivist interventions is too mean, so the solution defaults to a “stray cat” philosophy of managing drugs and schizophrenia
Locals don’t ride the cable cars
Of course not.
But they should would like some cable car end station type law enforcement on their block for a change.
They might if they went to places that were useful… and if the city was able to muster the will to do something about the awful conditions (schizophrenics menacing and threatening and spitting in your face) which would result if locals started using it. One portion of the locals in SF pay a king’s ransom in rent, while the other pay zero. That’s a big problem for any high-trust society, and you can’t have good public transport in a low-trust society. It’s the elephant in the room
Cable cars leave the endpoints full.
Nobody gets off until the ride is over, at the other endpoint.
Hence nobody even tries to get on anywhere except the amusement park type end station with the two hour line.
It’s a terrible, tourist trap, roller coaster.
Not public transit in any way.
Like most of the SF tourist traps, it gets special enforcement.
Try complaining about something new, you’re so boring.
SF has plenty of options for getting people around, I sometimes ride the cars if my backpack is particularly heavy or if I’m tired.
It makes my city more interesting than yours, and it’s fun to ride a piece of history. Cry about it.
I love the old streetcars on the F-line. I didn’t travel to the city for almost 20 years, despite living in the Bay Area. As once I lost interest in bar crawling the only reason for me to go every week evaporated. But lately I’ve been going just to be a tourist and SF still has it’s charms to me.
Interesting?
You do you.
It’s possible that the current shitshow has resulted in empty seats on cable cars.
SF is ‘finding out’. Watch step.
Truth: I have to go in tomorrow morning. Sucks. But once every 5 years or so isn’t that bad. IIRC Last time was Primus at Warfield.
We should charge a high toll to SF bay residents to get across the Yalu causeway.
Because it’s worth it!
It is not the last cable car of it’s type in the world. There is also one in Llandudno, Wales.
That’s a Gondola lift which is not really at all the same
No, there’s a cable hauled street car as well. Like san fran.
As someone who has lived near and been in SF often for work and tourism, cable cars are sometimes useful and always fun. There are tons of things that only exist for tourists. I don’t get the comments above- maybe tear down the useless Eiffel Tower (it’s only for tourists) or space needle or Statue of Liberty or something. Geez.
This ^
Angry hackaday contrarians out in force to complain a historic railway is not as useful a modern bus sytem or exhilarating as a rollercoaster. Should we scrap the F too?
Can we keep the politics out of the chat and stick to the tech or the approaches taken to do this.
There are plenty of sites where you can go complain.
This is fun. I’m having fun. Thanks HaD
man that other thread is wild. but anyways, about san francisco…
the cable car system is worse than useless. i don’t know (or care) what motor/traction technology should be involved but the fact of the matter is that almost all of the public transit in the whole city spends most of its time waiting behind private cars. i think cable cars would seem pretty handy if they never stopped — and that would reduce wear on the cable-grips — but since they stop all the time they’re useless. i rode on one once as a tourist and the only transportation benefit to the experience was learning not to do that again.
the crazy thing is that privileging the private car in this manner produces an awful experience for drivers too. nobody wins.
grade-separation (or dedicated corridor) is the holy grail of transit for a reason
I’m just here to nitpick the photo caption; that car is not navigating traffic but at the end of the line being turned around on a large turntable, a ritual still performed today.