There were a few things we knew we wanted to do in San Francisco. See the Golden Gate Bridge, visit Alcatraz, get something to eat or drink at Ghirardelli and check out Fisherman’s Wharf.
There was something else we wanted to do too – ride one of the city’s iconic cable cars.
After a long day wandering around Fisherman’s Wharf, the prospect of walking up steep hills for 1.5 miles to our hotel on Nob Hill didn’t exactly fill us with excitement.
One of the cable car lines had a stop a block over from our hotel, so that was the perfect opportunity to ride one. We therefore walked down to the Hyde St & Beach St station to get our tickets and wait in line.
Single rides on San Francisco’s cable cars cost $8. You can prepay for your tickets by using MuniMobile or Clipper Card; we didn’t have either, so we just got them at the station as there was a ticket booth there. We probably could’ve ordered an Uber for a similar price and gotten back to our hotel much sooner, but where’s the fun in that?!
It seemed like quite a few people had a similar idea to us that day because there was a bit of a line to take a ride. That meant we had to wait about 45 minutes before getting to board a cable car, but it meant we got to see the cable car operators using a turnabout a few times.
Hyde St is the end/beginning of the line and this station doesn’t have a wide corner whereby the cable car can turn around to face the other direction. As a result, the cable car gets driven on to a turnabout and manually pushed around by the operators to face the correct direction. Here’s a video we took showing it in action:
We got lucky when it was our time to board. The front half of cable cars have a long step on either side whereby passengers can stand on the outside of it. I really wanted to stand on the side of the cable car as we rode along, but there are limited spaces to be able to do that. Thankfully we were towards the front of the line and so I was able to stand on the side while Shae decided to sit down.
San Francisco’s cable cars are pulled along by a cable that runs beneath the tracks. Drivers use a grip to connect more tightly to it when wanting to go faster and releasing it when needing to stop.
We visited the Cable Car Museum on our last morning in San Francisco. Check out this post for more about that, but here’s information from the museum about how the grip works.
Our first cable car ride was a lot of fun, especially seeing as I got to stand on the side. Even at full speed the car doesn’t travel at 10mph, but it feels faster than that and it’s certainly faster than we would’ve been able to walk uphill to our hotel!
Here’s a video of the first minute of our ride just after leaving Hyde St & Beach St station.
After cresting a hill, our ride continued downwards for a while – here’s video from that part which has some lovely views of the city as the sun went down over San Francisco.
Seeing as we took the Powell/Hyde cable car line, we got off at the Powell St & California St stop as that was the closest stop to the InterContinental Mark Hopkins. The California cable car line has a stop pretty much right outside the hotel, but that would’ve meant having to walk much further to get to the California line when initially boarding.
Riding the cable car was so much fun and helped us feel like we got a true taste of classic San Francisco – it’s definitely worth taking a ride when visiting the city.
[…] riding on an iconic San Francisco cable car, it made what we were seeing at the museum so much more fascinating. Located in Nob Hill, it was […]