San Francisco dedicates a cable car to Tony Bennett
Cable Car No. 53 made a special Valentine's Day ride to San Francisco's Nob Hill on Wednesday morning, including a stop outside the Fairmont Hotel, where the car was officially dedicated to singer Tony Bennett, who died in July at age 96.
It was at that hotel – in the Venetian Room, in 1961 – that Bennett first publicly performed his signature song, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” with lyrics about cable cars climbing halfway up the stars. The tune still inspires pride and nostalgia in many San Franciscans, and the Giants play it after every home victory.
The dedication, attended by Susan Benedetto, Bennett's widow, added to a recent string of positive news about the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, which operates the city's buses, streetcars and light rail lines.
Not long ago, the agency's director, Jeffrey Tumlin, worried it was heading toward a “budget cliff,” when money would run out and major cuts to services would have to be made.
But like a cable car climbing the steep California Street, the agency's fortunes are slowly rising.
The system now has 71 percent of the ridership it had before the pandemic, Tumlin said, which is quite high compared to other public transit agencies in the Bay Area. The figure for weekend drivers is even better, at 86 percent. Some bus routes have more riders than ever before, and Tumlin said the system's three historic cable car routes, beloved by tourists, were once again quite full.
“The cable cars are booming,” he said. “Everyone who visits San Francisco apparently gets on our cable cars.”
Tumlin said the agency has worked hard during the pandemic to make the Muni system “fast, frequent, reliable, clean and safe” — and it appears to be paying off.
The biggest key to Muni's recovery is adapting routes to serve a variety of neighborhoods and destinations, rather than relying primarily on downtown office workers, many of whom now work from home. Routes that pass hospitals or the Chase Center, where the Warriors play, are doing well.
The agency has built 25 miles of transit lanes to speed up bus service. The line that runs along Van Ness Avenue past City Hall now moves so fast that people engrossed in their phones often miss their stops and complain that the bus is too fast, Tumlin said.
The agency has given up strict schedules for its buses and switched to a system called headway management, which focuses on the time interval between buses and gives drivers more flexibility to avoid bunching up along the route.
Of course, it's not all rosy. The subway lines that run on fixed rails to the Financial District and Moscone Center are struggling without office workers and conventioneers to fill them.
The situation for BART, the rail system that connects the city to much of the Bay Area, is much more dire. As downtown continues to struggle to recover, so does BART: It has regained just 43 percent of its pre-pandemic attendance.
“Our ridership reflects office occupancy,” said Alicia Trost, BART spokeswoman. “It's that simple.”
BART continues to face a very real budget cliff. A windfall of additional state money last year postponed that scary scenario until 2026, but if a ballot measure expected to go before voters that year doesn't pass, the agency will be in real trouble, Trost said. The agency, with an annual operating budget of about $1 billion, will be short about $300 million in 2026 without a cash injection.
Bus agencies in the Bay Area generally do quite well. SamTrans in San Mateo County is back to 88 percent of its pre-pandemic ridership. Fixed rail services that serve mostly downtown commuters are not: Caltrain, which runs between San Francisco and Silicon Valley, has regained just 38 percent of its ridership.
Still, the mood Wednesday morning when it came to public transportation in the San Francisco area was pure happiness. Mayor London Breed; Larry Baer, the president of the San Francisco Giants; and other notables celebrated Bennett's life and the newly dedicated cable car. Benedetto said she wished her husband could have seen it.
“He would have been absolutely thrilled,” she said. “He loved the people of San Francisco, and they loved him.”
Heather Knight is bureau chief of The New York Times in San Francisco.
And before you go: good news
Some of Hollywood's biggest names gathered at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills on Monday for the annual Oscar nominees luncheon. But in a crowd that included Hollywood veterans like Margot Robbie and Martin Scorsese, it was a new star who stole the show: Messi, the black-and-white Border Collie from the French drama “Anatomy of a Fall.”
Messi, who plays Snoop, the family dog, in the film, has acquired a fan base on social media – as well as a 'Palm Dog' at the Cannes Film Festival – for his impressive performance, which at one point was a moving display of (almost ) playing dead.
On Monday, Messi wore a blue bow tie and was accompanied by a date: his owner and trainer, Laura Martin Contini. He seduced actors, musicians and A-listers throughout the event, including Billie Eilish, who knelt to pet him.
The Times Culture reporter Kyle Buchanan and two photographers captured Messi's inaugural Oscar campaign on Monday, along with the rest of the eclectic event and the human attendees. Read the full article and view the photos here.