San Francisco is famous for the cable cars and so I was pleased to see that on the street next to my hotel was the terminal station of the Van Ness cable car. It was $8 for one way or $13 all day which covered al the buses and street cars too.
I don’t know how old these things are but they certainly looked authentic and painted beautiful and kept clean with shiny wooden interiors. I liked the way that you could sit outside without windows and lean out into the air (you are really supposed to but everyone does).
The people on the cable car were mostly like me, tourists ticking it off their list of things you have to do while in San Francisco, like visit Fisherman’s Wharf and go on a boat trip (both of which I did too).
I hadn’t realised that the city was quite so hilly and so the cable cars are really handy – some of those streets I would not have wanted to walk up without ropes! The cable cars moved to the sound of grinding metal on metal under the surface of the road. There was a driver and what appeared to be a brake man near the back.
As a cheap activity in an expensive city, and to avoid stepping over druggies lying comatose on the streets, cable cars are definitely worth the investment.