🚃 Rating Every Train in San Francisco

As some may know, I moved to Santa Clara about a year ago. But if a non-Californian asks me where I live, I’ve learned to skip the geography lesson and just say San Francisco. Despite how often I use this line, I recently realized I haven’t really explored San Francisco yet.

Sure, I’ve driven in for a few concerts - but that’s not exploring. Driving is all point-to-point. Pull up to the destination and park in the least sketchy lot you can find. Event ends, then drive home. So on my next company holiday, I knew what I wanted to do - explore San Francisco by riding and ranking every train in the city!

Caltrain

For the first leg of this trip, I had to get from Santa Clara to San Francisco. Other parts of the Bay are served by the BART, but in Silicon Valley we have Caltrain. Caltrain is regional rail - its main goal is to funnel people from one city center to another. Observationally, most Caltrain riders are commuters plugging away at laptops on their way to the city. (At least, those riding at 10:00 AM on a Friday morning).

The trains themselves are pretty nice! Caltrain just finished up a major effort to electrify the entire line, replacing the aging diesel locomotives with state-of-the-art electric trains. These are double-decker trains, with bike areas below and passenger cabins with tons of seating room above. They’re definitely more modern, but I think I preferred the more spacious, less plastic-y passenger cabins from the pre-electric cars.

Caltrain was originally a passenger route operated by California’s favorite railroad monopoly, Southern Pacific. This got my hopes up - surely a city as important as San Francisco would have a historic terminal (perhaps à la Grand Central in New York?) Pulling into the station, my hopes were immediately dashed. At one point, SP had a beautiful Mission Revival-style terminal building (left), but it was torn down in favor of the nothing-burger 4th and Townsend station in the 70’s. (right) What a shame.

Southern Pacific’s previous terminal, demolished in 1978	Caltrain’s uninspired replacement terminal

All in all, a trip from San Jose to SF on Caltrain will take you an hour thirty, and cost a fat $9.50. This is kinda pricey, but considering how much I’ve paid to park in SF it’s not horrible. Trains run every 30 minutes on weekdays and hourly on weekends, so you do have schedule around timetables more than other options. But all in all, Caltrain is great if you want to tune out for an hour and wake up in San Francisco.

Ratings: Caltrain

Frequency	Cost	Comfort/Cleanliness
2/5	2/5	5/5 (Diesel 6/5!)

Muni Metro (Streetcars / Trams)

Now that we’ve made it to SF, how do we get around? If you’re a local, you likely use the nation’s oldest publicly-owned transit system, Muni Metro! At one point in San Francisco’s history, up to ten transit companies operated cable cars and electric trollies. When a company called United Railways began buying up rail lines to form a monopoly, citizens revolted and founded Muni Metro - a city-owned and operated transit department. Muni’s streetcar lines started dwindling after the 1950s as buses replaced surface lines. However, purpose-built streetcar infrastructure like the Twin Peaks Tunnel saved the trams from total destruction. This is actually why Muni’s alphabetical line names start at the letter J: Lines A-H existed, but were removed long ago and never replaced¹.

Today, Muni has both pros and cons. First off, $2.75 per ride isn’t cheap (though there is a free transfer window to other Muni services). Despite dedicated right-of-ways, street running sections of Muni are slow and often stop for traffic signals. The stop request system hypothetically saves time, but nearly every station has someone to pick up / drop off so it’s not super effective. But things speed up underground - my T-line train maxed out at 28 MPH in the Central Subway tunnel. Trains are also modern and frequent, offsetting these travel time hiccups. It’d be fair to call the Muni streetcars a mixed bag.

Well, some trains are modern. All of Muni’s downsides turn into upsides once you step onto an E-Embarcadero train. The historic trolleycars are loud, cramped and slow - but this just adds to their charm! As a bonus, a ton of tourist destinations are along the E line. You can hit the Ferry Building, swing by Coit Tower, and end up in North Beach in one straight shot.

Interior of a modern Muni train	Interior of a retro Muni train

If you’re interested in the route I took…

Muni from Caltrain Station to the Ferry Building - Total time ~15 min.	Muni from the Ferry Building to North Beach

Ratings: Muni Metro

Frequency	Cost	Comfort/Cleanliness
5/5	2/5	3/5

Cable Cars

No, not that kind of cable car. San Francisco’s most quintessential mode of transit is may look like a streetcar, but that’s where the similarities end. 19th century engineers quickly learned that underpowered streetcars and hills don’t mix. In 1873, British entrepreneur Andrew Smith Hallidie was the first inventor with a solution. His innovation was simple - cable cars would be pulled up hills by a constantly-moving wire under the roadbed. By using a clutch (similar to a manual transmission), cable cars could “latch onto” the wire for acceleration up a hill or braking down the hill. Genius!

This system is really cool, but has a few quirks. For one, the car can’t travel faster than the cable’s constant 9.5 MPH. Cables are great at pulling in a straight line but curves are much more complicated. As a result, cars sometimes have build up enough speed on a downhill to coast through corners without cable assistance. Since runaway cable cars are bad news, they have three redundant braking systems! I could write at least three more paragraphs about how these work, but instead I’ll just recommend the SF Cable Car Museum on the corner of Mason and Washington. Here, you’ll get to see the beating heart of the cable car system, and it’s completely free!

SF Cable Car Museum	Cable room for San Francisco’s entire cable car system!

The Cable Car Museum’s website proclaims: “Tourists don’t come to San Francisco to ride the buses”. Fair point - but do cable cars' tourist popularity impact their transit usefulness? Eh, yes and no. Prices are steep (get it?) at $8.00 one-way. Wait times are long in touristy parts, especially at the North Beach turnaround. But there are two easy ways to mitigate this. First, skip the line by hiking a few stations down from the main terminal. Even if “full”, the car will nearly always stop and let you hop on. This normally gets you the coveted “hanging off the side” spot, too. Second, show the conductor your clipper card (the Bay Area’s transit payment system), and there’s a high likelihood they won’t charge you. (Maybe because you’ll look like a local?)

Ratings: Cable Car

Frequency	Cost	Comfort/Cleanliness
3/5	3/5	Who cares? Weeeeeeee!

BART

Rounding out this article is the Bay Area’s regional rail system, BART. While Caltrain and Muni have to tradeoff high speed with local stops, BART is laser focused on getting commuters into the metro area as fast as possible. Overall, I was surprised by how normal BART was. From the safety perspective, BART does have a bit of a reputation. As recently as 2023, 46% of BART riders have personally witnessed crime on the system. My ride from Powell Street to Millbrae was downright boring - chalk it up to either security improvements or the fact that it was 17:30 on a Friday.

Normal can be a double edged sword, though. During its inception, BART branded itself as the “transportation of the future” to coax commuters out of their cars. This meant a seats for every passenger, star-trek styled trains, and (unthinkable for a subway today), carpeted floors! Quirkiness went beyond style - BART made clever use of wider, broad-gauge track to better stabilize trains in San Francisco’s cutting wind. Today, the original luxury fleet is gone. The tracks are still weird, but now BART just feels like every other subway, which seems a little wrong for the consistently quirky Bay Area.

BART interior - lots of standing room	Hmm… This station reminds me of another article…

Since BART doesn’t continue into south bay, I had to transfer back to Caltrain at the SF Airport. Total cost: $5.80 - considering how smooth and well-connected BART was, this price feels alright to me.

Ratings: BART

Frequency	Cost	Comfort/Cleanliness
4/5	4/5	3/5

Conclusion:

On the Caltrain back to my place, I was struck by how many of my interactions with the city were shaped by public transit. Case in point, Coit Tower. If I were driving from the Ferry Building to North Beach, I probably wouldn’t have stopped by Coit Tower. Parking is expensive, which makes it committal. It’s hard to leave room for surprises or exploration with a parking meter ticking down in the back of your head. But taking the streetcar from the Ferry Building to North Beach is an entirely different story. Streetcars run every 15 minutes, so you might as well explore some stops along the way! As a tourist, public transit turns “is this really worth my time?” into “while I’m here…” So next time you travel, try the train! Your next favorite spot may only be a station away.

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1. Sorry for the Wikipedia citation. I couldn’t find a more digestible way to visualize how much Muni was gutted in the 50’s! ↩︎