streetcar.live

A few weeks ago, Tunnel Time added San Francisco to our list of cities. San Francisco has a lot of transit options including Muni Metro, buses, BART trains, e-scooters, bikes, ride sharing and the world famous cable cars. San Francisco is also home to a collection of vintage streetcars from around the world. These streetcars run on the E - Embarcadero and F - Market lines and are the result of the work of Market Street Railway. Market Street Railway is an advocacy group that is responsible for vehicle acquisition, maintenance and growth of these historical streetcars.

streetcar.live 🚋

One of the coolest things about these streetcars is a website I stumbled across: streetcar.live. Streetcar.live tracks the real-time location of all the active streetcars currently running on both the Embarcadero and Market lines. The site was created by Kat Siegal and Chris Arvin for the Market Street Railway group. Chris also has some great streetcar and transit themed merch over at: transit.supply. Some of those stickers have found a home on my laptop.

The site shows you the real time location of all the historic streetcars on the E and F routes in San Francisco. If you are visiting SF, the mobile version of the site will also use your phone’s location to show you nearby cars. Each streetcar has a little biography that often includes: date of manufacture, city of origin and a little history of that type of streetcar and how/if they played a role in the streetcar history of San Francisco. I never knew streetcars would be sold and moved between cities as much as they are. I was very excited to ride the No. 1074 Toronto TTC streetcar, but what I didn’t expect was to learn so much. Here’s a snippet of the type of info you can expect from streetcar.live:

In the 1970s Muni acquired 11 ex-Toronto PCCs (originally from Kansas City) for brief service in San Francisco. They essentially kept this same maroon and cream paint scheme, with Muni’s ‘cable car ribbon’ logo replacing the ‘TTC’ logo. Now, this handsome “Red Rocket” livery is back on San Francisco’s streets to stay.

For more info on the Market Street Railway or streetcar.live click the buttons below.